Time to put the phone addictions on hold for a bit, this one’s gonna be interesting! I have been searching for the perfect networked media player for many years now. It all started with XBMC running on my modded XBOX. I then graduated to my first Media PC, SageTV and a ton of HDD space, the combination created what was undoubtedly the best media center experience I could ask for. It had all the geek factor associated with running a computer on your TV, all the ease of access to my networked digital media and it was the best DVR I could ask for, it was just perfect!
Along came HDTV. all of a sudden I found myself needing a whole new computer if I wanted to keep SageTV going as a DVR. After doing some quick pricing of parts I decided I didn’t want to put out that kind of money for another media center PC and settled for the piece of crap Rogers HD PVR, it sucks but it works. I was still using SageTV at that point but all it did was play local digital media and the occasional stream of an episode of Diggnation. The final blow to that media PC came when I moved into a bigger place, the PC was perfect for the new “home office” leaving the TV sans media player. The PS3 did a good job of playing my digital media so I left it at that for a while but something about it just didn’t feel right as I began to considered granting it a permanent media player status. The Office PC still remained on all the time so that my RSS feeds would auto download new content as it became available, just seemed like a waste of electricity and total overkill to have that thing running all the time just for that.
Popcorn Hour C-200
Last January I was on a Server 2008 course and during some downtime one of my classmates started talking about his Popcorn Hour media player. I remember thinking “what is this device that this guy is making sound so magical?”. I started researching it and found that sure enough, I was able to put a check mark beside every one of my media player requirements and it also seemed to meet all my geek factor requirements and even had a torrent app built in so it would do my downloading for me. It was a match made in heaven (I know, I’m a weirdo 
). Only decision I had to make at that point was did I want the top of the line C-200 with the option of adding a Blu-ray drive or did I want the similarly capable A-200 that could still take a hard drive but no option for Blu-ray. The C-200 has the looks but was almost twice as much. The C-200 also comes with an RF remote (cool!) but I want it to work with my Harmony so I would need to get the optional IR adapter adding another $12 to the price. I decided in the end to go with the more expensive C-200. I didn’t do this because I wanted to put a Blu-ray drive in it, I had the PS3 for that. I went with the C-200 mainly because the thing was gonna look slick under my TV and you know what, it does!
I can already tell that I’m going to geek out with this thing for quite a while. I have already started developing a script to make it scan my podcasts folder for new downloads and display it on the screen so that I don’t have to check each folder manually, (this can be done because its running Linux in the background) and I may even post some of my apps here if I feel like any are good enough to release to the world.
So, is this toy right for you? This is not a “plug and play” solution for your TV, You have to play with it, massage it, add both hardware and software to it if you want to take full advantage of it. You may run into a lot of bugs and flaws along the way and you may need to wait patiently for firmware updates to fix said bugs. You may need to spend a few hours at a time figuring out how to install a new app that in the end will be worth the fight. If all that sounds acceptable to you then this may be the media player for you, if not, look elsewhere . If it does sound okay then you need to pick between the A-200 and the C-200. If you need Blu-ray go “C”, if you love the way it looks and don’t care about paying more go “C”. Other than that your probably going to be quite happy with the less expensive A-200. Regardless of what you get you will be joining an amazing community of both users and developers not to mention years of fun playing with your TV’s new best friend.
Later all,
Ed.