Install the app. JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly. You should upgrade or use an alternative browser. As good as it gets for file-type support? Review Specs Discussion Home AV Review. Popcorn Hour A Streamer What is the Popcorn Hour A?
The product reviewed here is not to be confused with the A Pro, which recently came to market on the back of Kickstarter campaign although they do share many of the same credentials. On paper, the A is a near holy grail of a product for those that like to stream their locally stored media collections with support for 4K and 3D video, including menus and subtitles, HD audio passthrough and gapless hi-res audio playback among the feature set.
Around the rear we have a USB 3. Finally, there are both Coaxial and Toslink digital audio outputs next to a hard power button. The supplied remote is, again, a cut above what we would normally expect from a network media streaming device and certainly much larger than most.
In the centre are the navigational and Enter buttons while below those are the volume and playback transport controls. You can further customise the launcher by choosing which Widgets to show at the bottom of the screen with options such as Networked Media, Apps Market, Local Media and Recently Played available.
Depending on how many files you have, the process could take some considerable time so you might want to leave it running overnight. Those grey thumbnails in a sea of posters really stick out like a sore thumbnail? Total Commander 8. Skip to content Windows 10 6. Edwin says:. October 15, at pm.
Nik says:. Bo Li says:. October 30, at am. November 1, at am. Tal Widerman says:. November 27, at pm. Ernest Cole says:. October 5, at pm. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. You need to get your Popcorn Hour plugged in to your router and get it recognised as a network device. You can do this wirelessly, but HD streaming is better wired, so I'd recommend getting a long flat ethernet cable and plugging straight into your router, or homeplugging, but not going wireless as it can't support the bandwidth for HD streaming.
After you've plugged it in, then you need to get your popcorn hour and PC to recognise each other. To do this, then you need to share your movies folder. Right click on your movies folder and select share option, then allow sharing. You will then need to find this share through the popcorn hour network share menu from the popcorn menu. If you browse to it and find it, then add it you'll be good to go. If you have a hard drive inside the popcorn hour, then you can also add that on your pc, by setting up a mapped drive from inside windows explorer.
It's pretty easy to do, just select the 'map network drive' option, give it a letter then just browse for your popcorn hour. If you have a hard drive in the popcorn hour, then you can drag films straight on to the device by doing this. It is not necessary though, if you are using the popcorn hour as a streamer only, then you can skip this step.
Whether you have mapped your popcorn hour to the pc or just connected the two devices and browsed to the film share through the popcorn hour, then you can just select the network share from the popcorn hour and see a list of films, which will play as soon as you select the film in question, or take it a bit further and install a jukebox, like YAMJ for example.
Installing YAMJ is quite straightforward as long as you follow the steps. The first thing to do is to get hold of it from here;. After you've made a folder, then unrar YAMJ into it. From here you will then need to run Guiconfig and use the program to set up the network share access for YAMJ. This is important, without this then it won't work.
To do this, you need to select the movie directory to scan, then tell it where they are, then save the NMT path. After this select the location to store the jukebox this should ideally be where your films are stored , then save. It will then ask you where you want to save the setup file and you want to save this into the YAMJ folder that you created earlier. I think it's a good idea to create a shortcut to this file and put it on the desktop, that way every time you make changes to your movie collection, you can rerun YAMJ to update it.
To make sure it downloads the correct information, you'll need to make sure your movies are named correctly. Use the 'name. So for example if you have the film 'Bolt', then name it Bolt. This way YAMJ knows which film to look for when it looks on the internet for information. It will connect to the internet and download all of the film info and build a jukebox.
This can take a while the first time, but after you've done it, the next time you update your collection and run YAMJ, then it will download only what it needs, so it is faster. To access this jukebox, after turning on the Popcorn Hour, you just browse to the network share where your films and jukebox are stored, select that and the jukebox will be displayed.
If you have multiple shares, then make sure that after you have gone through the guiconfig process, then press the add button before saving. You can set up multiple shares this way, so can have lots of different hard drives all with films stored on them all linked up in one jukebox. Setting this up correctly in Guiconfig is the part that really flummoxed me the first time, I didn't realise you could just keep adding shares.
If you do this then you can have multiple hard drives, all filled with films and YAMJ will compile them all into one jukebox, if you press save too early, it won't work.
The only thing you have to make sure is that before watching a film, you browse to the share to reconnect it. If your jukebox is stored in your films folder, then your popcorn hour will automatically do this, so you won't have to do anything. If you keep your popcorn hour on standby rather than switching it off, then the share connection will stay open, if you turn it off you'll have to browse to the share to reopen it each time.
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