Popcorn hour C-200

Update: A user's manual for the C-200 is now available online. It includes all the information I missed in the package when I bought mine. See the external link "C-200 manual".

In the middle of the summer of 2009, I did what we all do when the weather is warm and sunny: I went and got myself a nice big full HD television.

This, naturally, created all new problems and questions in my home. The foremost of which being that I had exactly one source capable of delivering any kind of HD viewing material. That source was my Imac, and even it struggled a bit too much for comfort when it came to full HD.

So, it was Time for Another Box. A media player of some sort. After benevolent prodding from well-meaning friends, my mind settled on the Popcorn hour C-200. A device which promised to do anything I might want it to, look pretty good, be open for modifications and updates and which was almost, but not quite, shipping.

The upside about that was that it spread my toy purchases out a bit. The downside was of course the silly situation of having an Imac sitting right next to the TV for a couple of months (with me sitting on the floor in front of it whenever I wanted to use my computer. Being lazy can be both uncomfortable and look silly when the stars align the right way).

I preordered my Popcorn and patiently sat around (often on the floor) until it was delivered toward the end of November. I had it delivered to work, picked up a 2.5" hard drive for internal storage on the way home and set about dismantling my new toy right after unpacking it.

My first impression was that the Popcorn hour was both larger and much more solid than I had expected. It is pretty much all nice solid metal and sized like a good amplifier or DVD player or something similar. The remote control fits in with most other remotes of the world: black, packed with buttons laid out in a decent order and with a rather mushy feel to each keypress.

The makers pretty much expect people to open up the box themselves, and they clearly put some thought into making it easy. One single screw is all it takes to get to the relatively spacious insides, and once there everything comes naturally if you have ever been inside a computer before.

However, I am not sure what you would do if you had never opened a computer case before. My Popcorn came without even the slightest shred of information on installing things internally. I do not know if I would have figured out that the mount point for the 2.5" drive was hidden below the bay for 3.5" devices without prior experience, in fact I'm not even that sure how I figured it out even now. And to get to it, the whole 3.5" bay needed to be dismounted, which took a lot more than one screw. So, I think at least a little diagram or something similar would be in order to give people a clue about how to install drives.

3.5" devices should be a much simpler story though, that drive seems to be slot-in. So all you would need to do in that case is open the front hatch, slide the drive in and be done.

To sum up the physical side of the C-200, I like the hardware and have had no problems with it. But I do think it could have come with at bit more information on how to handle it.

Usage

Popcorn hour connected to your TV, you want it to show something. The two basic options are to either put media on your Popcorn hour, or stream it over your network. The Popcorn comes without any internal storage, so if you do not wish to stream you have to get a hard drive (as I did), USB memory, DVD drive or something similar and connect. I have not tried the streaming aspects at all as playing films without needing a computer to be turned on was a large part of the attraction for me.

The Popcorn runs a whole host of services (and more can be installed) to let you put things on it. Plug it into your network, turn on a service or two (FTP for example) and start sending media to it.

Well, unless you try to send too fast ... I noticed that both the Popcorn and my Imac support gigabit ethernet (while my router does not), so I figured I could save some time by connecting them directly and transfer things. No luck, as actually activating gigabit speeds overwhelmed the device and made it lock up after a random while. Odd, and hopefully very fixable. But once you know it, you can luckily change a setting to force topping out at 100 megabit and just wait a bit longer for everything to finish.

Once you have your media, just browse to it, hit play and enjoy. I have yet to find a file which would not play, which is exactly the way I hoped it would be, and everything including full HD runs nice and smooth. The step in convenience is enormous from messing about with an extra computer, cables, VLC and dual screen setups to this. It just works, exactly the way it should be, and I have no clue why, somewhere deep down, I did not dare to expect that.

That said, there are snags every now and then. I have had one movie file for which sound just would not play, and sometimes when watching highly compressed avi files I get visual artifacts and corruption which looks a lot like what you'd get if the player could not keep up. On a device powerful enough to handle full HD content smoothly, choking on 700 megabytes of fuzziness seems odd, to say the least. I am wondering if some unusual encoding and/or some rogue background process might be to blame. In any case, all the more reason to stay away from content of low visual quality. It probably hurts the soul of your HD screen in any case ...

But there is more. Popcorn hours are very open and have a pretty active community discussing them and churning out various kinds of applications and extras. For example, the community has built a replacement web server you can install to speed up many applications. There are also various kind of download systems, new looks for the menus, applications to watch movie trailers and so on.

The one extra I use most, however, is the improved version of Transmission. The C-200 has a builtin bittorrent client (an older version of Transmission if I understand correctly), but it is not very pretty and not very configurable. So you can install the latest and greatest instead, which gives you more options and a very slick web interface which even works great on the Iphone.

This means I can be on any device and stumble on a torrent I want to download. Then I can download the torrent file (or just copy the link), surf into the Transmission web interface, feed it the file (or link) and get on with my day. I may be the very last person in the world to discover this, but it really feels somewhat magical to hand off long-running downloads to a dedicated machine and then be free to shut down the computer or anything else you can think of. The only thing you notice is some of your bandwidth being eaten up and whatever noise your C-200's hard drive may make while spinning.

Another advantage of the active community is that people have compiled rather substantial lists of compatible hardware on the wiki. That means you can look up hard, USB, DVD and blueray drives and see which brands and models are sure to work before getting one. And if you do run into a problem, chances are someone else has already been there and written about it. Never underestimate the amount of headaches you can save by searching the official forums and wiki.

What is not to like?

To sum it up: this is a device for those who like a little tinkering. It is not something Apple would release. The menus could be speedier, look prettier and gigabit network speeds could actually work. And you need to browse wikis to find out how to do things. But really, doing the homework is the demanding part. I have not run into any problem which required actual unix-hackery-type skills to solve. But you should not be afraid of port numbers, FTP usernames and passwords or similar things if you want to get the most out of your Popcorn hour. (Note that I have never tried any other devices solving the same problems, so I have no idea if other vendors provide simpler solutions.)

The only problems I have really had have been how to conveniently install and reinstall applications. As of right now, using the Windows application NMT community installer seems to be the smoothest way to go for me. It also got me sorted out when something (might have been a failed upgrade by a different installer) broke Transmission for me.

Oh, that thing about gigabit networking locking up the device is rather annoying too, even if it does not normally affect me at all.