The Popbox has finally arrived! The little box from the makers of the Popcorn Hour media streamer debuted to the public at CES way back in January, and after several delays, finally shipped late last week (you could complain about the delays, but considering the Boxee Box got pushed all the way back to November, hard to get too upset).
Anyway, mine was waiting on my doorstep this afternoon so I unboxed it real quick, plugged it in and fired it up.
First impressions were that the unit was a bit bigger footprint wise than my eGreat m34a (clone of the Popcorn Hour) it is replacing, but is noticeably thinner as well. The unit is about as minimalistic as it looked in all the promo photos. More or less a plain black box with a lone USB connection up front, and it's host of connections in the back (only HDMI & component output are supported, but if you were really thinking about hooking this thing up with a composite connection, you were probably missing the point anyway). The remote control is slick looking, and much more refined than previous Popcorn Hour offerings that looked and felt cheap. The power button is at the very bottom of the remote which I always find annoying as it belongs at the top, but whatever.
As a side note, the unit shares similar but not identical remote codes as its Popcorn Hour predecessors. I randomly tried using my already programmed Harmony remote and some of the controls worked just fine on the Popbox, some worked but repeated themselves (for example hitting the right arrow key would move the cursor to the right twice for whatever reason). I'm sure once I reprogram the Harmony for the Popbox itself it'll work just fine.
Anyway, after turning the unit on, it got as far as the welcome screen then told me a new firmware version was available and it would be downloaded automatically. Sure enough, it quickly downloaded a new firmware file and ran through the process of upgrading the unit and rebooting itself. All in all, the whole process took about 5 minutes.
So upon getting to the main menu, you're given 4 options. Media Library, Apps, Search, and Settings. Settings give you the options you'd expect for audio/video setup, network, etc.. It's also here that you define your media library. You can either tell it to scan certain folders on a USB connected device, or first add network shares if you're connecting it to folders over your home LAN. For me, I wanted it to scan my music folder on my NAS upstairs, so I first added the NAS drive as a network share (you have your choice of SAMBA or NFS), then added two media folders, one being my music drive, the other where I have some random movie trailers and whatnot. It then starts scanning those folders to add them to your library and automatically populate information there with info about each file. This process takes awhile. A long while really. So I just let it sit for awhile.
Back at the main menu (you can do other things while it's scanning your media library), the APPS menu is where Popbox's online apps reside. When it was announced they talked about a number of different content partners that would be here, including Netflix. Well, as wsa announced a couple weeks back, Netflix isn't here. Not yet anyway. While Popbox says that the hardware is all set to support services like Netflix, Hulu, etc..., it just wasn't ready to go yet. So, they've cryptically left the door open for apps such as those to be made available via firmware update. So what we're left with here is 10 other apps including Livestation, nextnewnetworks, photobucket, Picasa, Revision3, Shoutcast Radio, twitter, Video Detective, WeatherBug, and Youtube. Other than youtube there wasn't much there to excite me at this point. I installed the youtube app (a quick download, it maybe took about 5 seconds) and fired it up. You're presented with a scattering of preview images from the "most viewed" videos, but a left button press on the remote brings up the full menu which allows you to search, look at your favorte videos, etc.. All in all the app worked quickly and quite well. It's navigation is very similar to the Youtube integration on my Samsung Blu-Ray player, but seemed quite a bit snappier.
Enough about apps, back to the main menu. The other remaining 2 options are Media Library and Search. Frankly, it seems kind of odd they included these as separate options as they take you to the same screen, but search automatically brings up a search box for you to find content. You could accomplish this the same way by just hitting the search button on your remote control. But whatever, the options is there.
The Media Library is obviously the guts of this device. It is by far THE biggest improvement over previous iterations of Syabas/Popcorn Hour players, or another other set top player for that matter. The only thing it can't match is XBMC or Boxee, but that's clearly the bar it's trying to reach for. The library it split into videos, music, and photos, with your content from the folders you told it to search through displayed accordingly.
Music: This is a big improvement over previous Syabas based boxes, but still leaves a bit to be desired. Your music collection is listed by artist initially, though you can instead set it to albums, or playlists. The biggest problem lies in the fact that in artist view, if you have more than 1 album by that artist, all of the songs from all of the albums are jumbled together. It needs the ability to go artist->album->song, but instead is just either artist->song or album->song, depending on your view. Also, albums aren't organized by track order, but rather alphabetical order, another oversight that seemingly could be fixed in firmware should they choose to do so. I also had problems scrolling through different pages of a list of artists or albums, sometimes it would just seemingly refuse to do so. Another item for the next firmware version perhaps? Playback works well though. Clicking ok on a song starts the player and the album artwork is displayed on the side of the screen along with information about the song. It worked as expected essentially, which is far more than you could say about previous Syabas/Popcorn Hour devices in which is was a complete crapshoot as to what would play and what wouldn't in the audio department. I tested both VBR MP3's as well as FLAC files and both played fine.
Movies:
One thing the Syabas players always excelled at was video. 1080p content, HD-audio bitstreaming, they'd play just about anything you could throw at them. How does the Popbox fare in that department? Almost as well, but oddly enough there doesn't seem to be any HD bitstreaming available, at this point anyway. While playing back an .M2TS file with HD audio, it would output the HD audio via LPCM, which frankly isn't any loss in quality, but it seems odd that the player can't bitstream, a feature that has been present in previous generation players for some time now. This seems like another feature that may very well get added later on in the firmware cycle.
Video wise it played everything without a hitch. 1080p .mkvs, quicktime movie trailers, and .M2TS files that I tested all worked fine over my wired network connection.
The UI in the video section of the media library? Well, I can't get it to work. I select a folder on my NAS for it to scan, but nothing ever populates. Maybe I'm missing something, or maybe I'm just not giving it enough time, but it's a no go thus far. You can navigate down to the "USB/Network" option which just gives you the ability to manually browse for files, so I can still play things fine, but I cant' figure out what the deal is with the media library not wanting to work. I'll update if/when I get this working.
Photos: I didn't spend much time with this, but I had a few photos in a directory, it detected them, let me view them, it seemed to work fine.
Summary: It definitely seems like the most refined set-top streaming box available, but, it still has some bugs they need to work out. For the price you pay ($129.99) you're getting a hell of a player that can play anything you throw at it. If they can quickly work out some of the problems I've encountered, and add some better premium content apps (Netflix, Amazon VOD, Hulu, etc..) they'll definitely have something to make the Boxee Box people worried.
Update: I wound up getting the video media library working. I'm still not sure what happened and why it wouldn't work right away, but I wound up removing the video folder from the media library and re-adding it to force a new scan of that folder. After letting it sit for awhile, I came back, went to the media library, and voila, there were the movies. It's laid out pretty well, with subheadings for Home Movies, Movies (with data and cover art scraped from IMDB), and TV Shows (again, from IMDB). The display looks really good, again rivaling XBMC's library view, however feels sluggish while navigating through it, especially when flipping pages. In the end though, it's a HUGE step up from the UI, or lack thereof, of previous iterations of these types of devices.
Anyway, mine was waiting on my doorstep this afternoon so I unboxed it real quick, plugged it in and fired it up.
First impressions were that the unit was a bit bigger footprint wise than my eGreat m34a (clone of the Popcorn Hour) it is replacing, but is noticeably thinner as well. The unit is about as minimalistic as it looked in all the promo photos. More or less a plain black box with a lone USB connection up front, and it's host of connections in the back (only HDMI & component output are supported, but if you were really thinking about hooking this thing up with a composite connection, you were probably missing the point anyway). The remote control is slick looking, and much more refined than previous Popcorn Hour offerings that looked and felt cheap. The power button is at the very bottom of the remote which I always find annoying as it belongs at the top, but whatever.
As a side note, the unit shares similar but not identical remote codes as its Popcorn Hour predecessors. I randomly tried using my already programmed Harmony remote and some of the controls worked just fine on the Popbox, some worked but repeated themselves (for example hitting the right arrow key would move the cursor to the right twice for whatever reason). I'm sure once I reprogram the Harmony for the Popbox itself it'll work just fine.
Anyway, after turning the unit on, it got as far as the welcome screen then told me a new firmware version was available and it would be downloaded automatically. Sure enough, it quickly downloaded a new firmware file and ran through the process of upgrading the unit and rebooting itself. All in all, the whole process took about 5 minutes.
So upon getting to the main menu, you're given 4 options. Media Library, Apps, Search, and Settings. Settings give you the options you'd expect for audio/video setup, network, etc.. It's also here that you define your media library. You can either tell it to scan certain folders on a USB connected device, or first add network shares if you're connecting it to folders over your home LAN. For me, I wanted it to scan my music folder on my NAS upstairs, so I first added the NAS drive as a network share (you have your choice of SAMBA or NFS), then added two media folders, one being my music drive, the other where I have some random movie trailers and whatnot. It then starts scanning those folders to add them to your library and automatically populate information there with info about each file. This process takes awhile. A long while really. So I just let it sit for awhile.
Back at the main menu (you can do other things while it's scanning your media library), the APPS menu is where Popbox's online apps reside. When it was announced they talked about a number of different content partners that would be here, including Netflix. Well, as wsa announced a couple weeks back, Netflix isn't here. Not yet anyway. While Popbox says that the hardware is all set to support services like Netflix, Hulu, etc..., it just wasn't ready to go yet. So, they've cryptically left the door open for apps such as those to be made available via firmware update. So what we're left with here is 10 other apps including Livestation, nextnewnetworks, photobucket, Picasa, Revision3, Shoutcast Radio, twitter, Video Detective, WeatherBug, and Youtube. Other than youtube there wasn't much there to excite me at this point. I installed the youtube app (a quick download, it maybe took about 5 seconds) and fired it up. You're presented with a scattering of preview images from the "most viewed" videos, but a left button press on the remote brings up the full menu which allows you to search, look at your favorte videos, etc.. All in all the app worked quickly and quite well. It's navigation is very similar to the Youtube integration on my Samsung Blu-Ray player, but seemed quite a bit snappier.
Enough about apps, back to the main menu. The other remaining 2 options are Media Library and Search. Frankly, it seems kind of odd they included these as separate options as they take you to the same screen, but search automatically brings up a search box for you to find content. You could accomplish this the same way by just hitting the search button on your remote control. But whatever, the options is there.
The Media Library is obviously the guts of this device. It is by far THE biggest improvement over previous iterations of Syabas/Popcorn Hour players, or another other set top player for that matter. The only thing it can't match is XBMC or Boxee, but that's clearly the bar it's trying to reach for. The library it split into videos, music, and photos, with your content from the folders you told it to search through displayed accordingly.
Music: This is a big improvement over previous Syabas based boxes, but still leaves a bit to be desired. Your music collection is listed by artist initially, though you can instead set it to albums, or playlists. The biggest problem lies in the fact that in artist view, if you have more than 1 album by that artist, all of the songs from all of the albums are jumbled together. It needs the ability to go artist->album->song, but instead is just either artist->song or album->song, depending on your view. Also, albums aren't organized by track order, but rather alphabetical order, another oversight that seemingly could be fixed in firmware should they choose to do so. I also had problems scrolling through different pages of a list of artists or albums, sometimes it would just seemingly refuse to do so. Another item for the next firmware version perhaps? Playback works well though. Clicking ok on a song starts the player and the album artwork is displayed on the side of the screen along with information about the song. It worked as expected essentially, which is far more than you could say about previous Syabas/Popcorn Hour devices in which is was a complete crapshoot as to what would play and what wouldn't in the audio department. I tested both VBR MP3's as well as FLAC files and both played fine.
Movies:
One thing the Syabas players always excelled at was video. 1080p content, HD-audio bitstreaming, they'd play just about anything you could throw at them. How does the Popbox fare in that department? Almost as well, but oddly enough there doesn't seem to be any HD bitstreaming available, at this point anyway. While playing back an .M2TS file with HD audio, it would output the HD audio via LPCM, which frankly isn't any loss in quality, but it seems odd that the player can't bitstream, a feature that has been present in previous generation players for some time now. This seems like another feature that may very well get added later on in the firmware cycle.
Video wise it played everything without a hitch. 1080p .mkvs, quicktime movie trailers, and .M2TS files that I tested all worked fine over my wired network connection.
The UI in the video section of the media library? Well, I can't get it to work. I select a folder on my NAS for it to scan, but nothing ever populates. Maybe I'm missing something, or maybe I'm just not giving it enough time, but it's a no go thus far. You can navigate down to the "USB/Network" option which just gives you the ability to manually browse for files, so I can still play things fine, but I cant' figure out what the deal is with the media library not wanting to work. I'll update if/when I get this working.
Photos: I didn't spend much time with this, but I had a few photos in a directory, it detected them, let me view them, it seemed to work fine.
Summary: It definitely seems like the most refined set-top streaming box available, but, it still has some bugs they need to work out. For the price you pay ($129.99) you're getting a hell of a player that can play anything you throw at it. If they can quickly work out some of the problems I've encountered, and add some better premium content apps (Netflix, Amazon VOD, Hulu, etc..) they'll definitely have something to make the Boxee Box people worried.
Update: I wound up getting the video media library working. I'm still not sure what happened and why it wouldn't work right away, but I wound up removing the video folder from the media library and re-adding it to force a new scan of that folder. After letting it sit for awhile, I came back, went to the media library, and voila, there were the movies. It's laid out pretty well, with subheadings for Home Movies, Movies (with data and cover art scraped from IMDB), and TV Shows (again, from IMDB). The display looks really good, again rivaling XBMC's library view, however feels sluggish while navigating through it, especially when flipping pages. In the end though, it's a HUGE step up from the UI, or lack thereof, of previous iterations of these types of devices.
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