Comments on: Popcorn Hour NMT (Networked Media Tank) A-100

By: Jay

Jay — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:36:37 +0000

Hi,
Would anyone know where to manually download the NMT application for C200 ?
Many thanks.

By: laurie

laurie — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 23:08:48 +0000

heyas

i have a 1TB drive in my media player, its a Popcorn hour A110

i plug the usb in and it makes the noise that it does when ya plug in a USB device. but i cannot get into the drive

anyone know what i can do?

also i used this for ages on winxp no worries have just upgraded to win7 64bit and now havin trouble

if i look in disk management i can not do anything to the drive but have the option to delete the partition

By: Santhakumar

Santhakumar — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:51:22 +0000

Hi,
Will someone be able to give some step by instructions , similar to this, on how to setup the hard disk on Popcornhour C200 please. Just want to be able to transfer movie file, songs , photos etc to the NMT and play from there. I have an internal SATA disk so, unable to connect to the PC otherwise.

Some help is much appreciated.

Thanks.

By: webmaster

webmaster — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:11:35 +0000

Hi k957
Excellent find! The filters still suck, but not having to go back to square one every time you want to swap is great. I must have missed that one in the ChangeLogs.

By: k957

k957 — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:54:44 +0000

Great Article.
WRT playlists – you can change the filter without changing directories via the primary colored buttons at the bottom of the remote. I thought I was crazy until I read your article (no way they’d make you do that… do I really have to navigate all the way back, this sucks), happened across the wiki page and.. the filters can be changed “in place”. I’d like an option/button to remove filtering… but whatever.

nnt wiki, look for article: Media_Option_Filter

By: webmaster

webmaster — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:51:39 +0000

Hi informative
You can enable login-functionality on the box, then log in and copy things across from your USB drive when you need to. See http://www.lundman.net/wiki/index.php/NMT:telnetd for an example of setting this up. And yes, waiting for patches for the PCH is starting to look like an olympic sport at the moment. Apparently most things are on hold right now as they’re trying to squeeze a new product out the door. Hopefully they’ll get back on track with the updates after that.

By: informative

informative — Mon, 04 May 2009 23:07:14 +0000

I’m still trying to find out if there is anyway to move a video (file) from the front USB port (removable drive) onto the internal drive to be stored and accessed later. Anyone figure out how to do this yet? Everyone and their brother seems to have USB pocket thumb drives they carry around with them with photos, videos etc and would be really awesome if we could fast-forward to 1990 and make it that we can not only access and play something off the flash drive but actually COPY the file across to the internal drive for storage. Otherwise my 1TB drive will remain woefully empty for a very very long time. Love the PCH – hard to love the waiting for patches and …starting… to think they may never actually get here..

By: Dennis Mulder

Dennis Mulder — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 08:48:36 +0000

Great review!
This info gave me the right reasons to buy this machine. I’m using it for a week now and am very satisfied. Thanks to you I know the less good issues and the strong points of this device.

Cheers, Dennis

By: webmaster

webmaster — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:20:21 +0000

Hi georgjetson
Sorry about the late reply, been busy lately.
As for your questions. As for Boxee I haven’t really looked at how their offering works on the technical level. It’s highly unlinkely that you will be able to install something on the PCH that will allow you to use Boxee, but there is nothing stopping Boxee (or some random enthusiast) from making a web page specifically tailored to the PCH and use it over the net. This has been done for last.fm and a couple of other streaming services, and work well.

The PCH does not have a tuner. Again, it’s very unlikely that it will ever get one as well. Not really where the box is aimed. With a little effort, you could install a TV Tuner card in a PC and then set it up to provide the PCH with a stream of the TV programs using VLC or any of a dozen other *cast programs. Note that this will take a bit of effort though.

If another media player should happen to drop into my mailbox, I’ll review it. But I don’t have the money to go out and buy a random set of boxes just to review them. Too little money in adword clicks at this level I’m afraid.

You can not install your own OS here. The CPU used is a MIPS-based thing with a LOT of limitations (including running at about 300MHz), so running a generic OS on it is out of the question. If you’re contemplating using your own OS, I’d buy one of those tiny 4″x4″x2″ Intel-based PCs that have cropped up lately.

By: webmaster

webmaster — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:09:04 +0000

Hi Paul
Sorry about the late reply, been busy. I have looked at a couple of the others. But only one in any detail, the Syvio-200. I’ve even reviewed it for a local A/V news site. It’s fairly identical to the PCH A-110, as it must be since it’s based on the same platform and firmware. What I find that differentiates one NMT from the other is really the look’n'feel of the gui and the responsiveness of the support organisations. Take Syvio, they’re now several months behind with their current firmware, which isn’t really good when all they do is get the pre-built firmware from Syabas and put it up on a web site somewhere. If you want to set your box apart from the rest, then my advise is:
1. Make sure your firmware is always up to date. Shouldn’t take more than a few days after Syabas releases the master.
2. Put a little effort into the GUI, i.e. decent background, colours and images.
3. Write a better user manual. Most NMT manuals I’ve seen frankly suck big time.
4. Make sure your support is friendly, perhaps by having them be on the networkedmediatank.com forum to answer questions about your particular brand.
The thing that makes the NMT so great (identical hardware/firmware across vendors) also makes it tricky for vendors like you to stand out. So go for the non-tangible changes.