Product Description The PopBox makes it simple and affordable to play all the movies, home videos, photos, and music stored on your home PC/network as well as streamed from the Internet on your HDTV! With PopBox you can finally give your HDTV what its been hungering for - all the best sports, entertainment, movies, videos, and music the Internet has to offer, PLUS an incredibly simple way to play all of your own stored movies, home videos, pictures and music on your HDTV sets and home theater system. Why watch things that were meant for the big screen on a computer monitor when you and your family can enjoy it all in any room of your house on your HDTV? With PopBox connected to your HDTV suddenly everything can go big screen! And we've made sure to make setup automated and simple - just hook the PopBox up to your Internet connection and it does the rest! From the Manufacturer With PopBox connected to your HDTV everything can go big screen! You finally have an incredibly simple way to play ALL of your own stored movies, home videos, pictures and music on your HDTV home theater, PLUS with PopBox Internet TV Apps you can now easily access the Internet’s most popular TV shows, videos, movies, sports, music and games on any HDTV in the house. Your Home Media Library—Now Playing on Your Big Screen HDTV If you’ve got movies, home videos, pictures and music files saved on your home network hard drives, PopBox finds them and plays them back on your HDTV home theater system. Click above to enlarge Movies view. Watch Crystal Clear Movies, TV Shows, and Home Videos in High Definition PopBox lets you watch your stored movies and TV shows (all of your Blu-rays and DVDs) in amazing clarity on your HDTV. To make it easy to browse through your movie and TV library, PopBox automatically accesses IMDb online to display a thumbnail of the movie or TV show instead of just a file name! And DVD menus and Blu-ray basic menus work just fine with the PopBox remote too. POPBOX SUPPORTS THESE VIDEO FORMATS: MPEG1/2/4 Elementary (M1V, M2V, M4V) MPEG1/2 PS (M2P, MPG, DAT, VOB) MPEG2 Transport Stream (TS, TP, TRP, M2T, M2TS, MTS) AVI ASF WMV Matroska (MKV) MOV (H.264) MP4 RMP4 FLV F4V AAC PopBox also automatically finds and categorizes Home Video files that you’ve taken with your high def or standard def video camera. Using an easy to navigate menu, you can now play videos for family and friends on your HDTV that you’ve stored on your computer, or even directly from your Flip or other digital camera by plugging into the USB port on the front of the PopBox. PopBox automatically plays all the most popular file formats—so you don’t have to worry about anything except picking what movie, TV show, or home video clip you want to watch! Click above to enlarge Music view. Enjoy Superb Audio Quality and MusicFor amazing audio quality playback of your movies and music to either your HDTV or to your stereo receiver, PopBox supports Dolby Digital and DTS Master Audio through HDMI and SPDIF (optical audio). PopBox automatically finds and organizes your music so you can play it back on your home theater system and enjoy it throughout the house! POPBOX SUPPORTS THESE AUDIO FORMATS: M4A MPEG audio (MP1, MP2, MP3, MPA) WAV WMA FLAC OGG Click above to enlarge Photos view. Photos on Your Flat Screen With PopBox it’s simple to present a slideshow on your HDTV—PopBox automatically finds and organizes your digital photo collection (jpg, gif, png, and bmp files) and beautifully resizes your pictures for display on your HDTV! The Best Internet Apps—Now Playing on Your Big Screen HDTV PopBox Apps bring to your HDTV an ever expanding lineup of the Internet’s most popular entertainment, sports, games, and social media content—including YouTube and Twitter. Click above to enlarge Apps view. PopBox Apps are like Apps for your cellphone—but they are designed to let you view more content, play more games and music, and access your favorite social networks directly on your HDTV. PopBox is adding more Apps everyday—see our website for the latest! Easy to Setup and Operate Just hook the PopBox up to your HDTV and Internet connection and it does the rest. Click above to view PopBox HDTV connectors. PopBox to your HDTV or Home Theater ReceiverYou can use an HDMI cable (included) or Component Video cables to connect your PopBox to your HDTV. PopBox does not work with Standard Definition TVs. You can also use an Optical Audio cable to connect the PopBox to your Home Theater System. PopBox to the InternetYou can connect the PopBox to your router and the Internet in one of two ways. By purchasing the PopBox Media Player and utilizing an Ethernet cable, or, if you prefer to have one less wired connection in your house, the PopBox Wireless Media Player comes with the PopBox Wireless Network USB adapter that automatically connects to your Wireless Home Network. If you purchase the PopBox Media Player and later decide you wish to go wireless, you can purchase the PopBox Wireless Network USB adapter separately. Click above to enlarge image. Operating the PopBoxPopBox automatically connects to your Home Network and finds, categorizes, and organizes all of your movies, videos, music, and photos—PopBox Apps do the same for Internet content. The onscreen menus and remote control are a pleasure to use and make operating the PopBox a snap. Support PopBox is standing by with Customer Support seven days a week if you have any trouble setting up or using your PopBox.
D**H
I don't need another freaking hobby
Update 21 Aug 2010:Just returned second unit. Have spent 15+ hours trying to get it to reliably play a movie from my server. I can eventually get it to recognize a network share, but only after defining the share, then going to the media page, then back to the share config page. Share config page will not see the share until the media page is viewed once. Movies then get indexed and will play. Until a few hours later, at which point the PB loses connectivity with the server. I've tried everything to make it happy with the shares, including using a fixed IP address for the server and creating a user account for it. It'll work after I do a factory reset, reconfigure the shares, do the ritual touch of the media screen and cast the chicken bones. For a while. My Sonos works on the same network, getting music from the same server, and it works. Every time. Even when the network is reconfigured. It took me all of 10 minutes to configure. A year ago. Never a problem since.The PopBox is unusable in it's current state. I'm not sure how they convinced themselves that this thing was ready for limited beta test or even an alpha, much less a full-on production release. Most functions that I'd consider must-have and must-be-solids either don't work reliably or aren't there at all. The bottom line is that this thing's supposed to play a movie from my home server over my home network, after a configuration procedure that can be performed by an average consumer. It doesn't perform it's primary, basic, essential intended function.I'm not sure what's going on, but looks like a shell of a product got released in the hope that the resulting cash flow would fund the actual product development. Not with my cash. Syabas is dead to me.Original Review:I was excited enough about the PopBox to pre-order. After reading the early reviews I left it in the box until night before last. Hooked it up and got ERR022. Got the USB drive out and ran the recovery procedure. Twice. Exactly per the instructions from Syabas. No joy--it's a brick. Returned it.Got a new one from Amazon and hooked it up last night. It updated fine. Loaded YouTube app fine. Freezes on about 1/3 of the YouTube videos I've tried. Got it to find my video share with almost no problems (but the add share interface could use some reworking soon--the browse option wasn't obvious to me and having to select from Samba/NFS/TCP NFS probably ain't gonna work for the average consumer).After scanning, no thumbnails and it displayed the file name as the movie name. I attempted to edit one of these to the actual movie name. Hit enter and the box locked up. Had to pull power. Upon reboot it had the thumbnails and descriptions. Only have 12 movies ripped, but am concerned about the lack of genre / cast / etc. selection ability--this interface won't work for 600+ titles.I'm going to have to side by side test with my DVD/BD player, but SD content looked a little soft and I'm playing ISOs. Not being able to resume the movie is tedious and it's really easy to push the wrong button and bail out of the movie. No glitches on playback that I could see and skips worked fine.I've developed embedded firmware for over 30 years in startups and large companies, for medical, cellphone, telecom and semiconductor applications. This kind of stuff should be happening in the lab. If at all. It could be a lot of late-stage integration problems, in which case we should see substantial improvement in the next couple of firmware updates, or it could be a giant cobbled together hack, in which case we'll still be screwing with it this time next year. I'm waiting another week or so and then punting back to Amazon if the stability issues aren't substantially resolved, if I can't stop and resume a movie at the same location, or if the picture really is softer than what I get from my DVD player.I need a system that family and guests can use to play our 600+ DVD/BD ISO files from the server. It needs to come up, have a consumer-grade graphical interface, allow browsing/searching, and I want it to scrape something for the thumbs/names/descriptions so I don't have to maintain nfo files. It needs to just work. I don't have the time or interest to tinker with something, and I'm really, really tired of being the human remote control for movies.It's not looking good.
D**E
Loads of potential, doesn't deliver now.
I feel sorry for this device, but it is going back. It froze playing approximately 75% of my videos. The interface frequently leaves you in a black-screen limbo with no way forwards or backwards without powering down the box. You can't power down the box without unplugging it (not too hard because the plug fits very shallowly into the socket on the back of the device.) When the PopBox works, it work just OK. Response time can be very laggy and awkward working through large filelists. The network functionality (wired to router, bridged 802.11N to Linux Samba fileserver) worked great and it worked well connecting to the Internet for firmware updates. The unit was pathetic playing Yahoo videos (video would freeze up and audio would continue with a static image at the point it froze.) For an example of this, search "swedish popcorn" and play the first video (Muppets Swedish Chef making Popcorn Shrimp). The humorous disclaimer at the beginning of the video plays fine, but when the video should start the audio continues and there is no video, just the image of the disclaimer. My Sony BluRay player plays this same video fine. There seem to be some third-party utilities to mess around with the database on the SD card to get everything just so...
G**S
I had high hopes but it turned out as a big letdown
Scraping is horrendous with TV Shows, it locks up a lot, no netflix (was pulled in ads prior to release) You can't delete shows from the popbox...if you delete the file on the server it will just have a dead link on the popbox. UI is buggy to say the least...if it pulls the wrong show there is no way to tell it...it locks up a lot....online apps were buggy they crashed and upgrading was a pain.I have found it to be a good streamer if you just don't set up any cataloging. I just access my media through the network shares option and with that it is as good as WDTV Live.The pretty interface is somewhat of a waste because when it does work it is just not designed for a large library. I have 450 titles and that is too many for it to handle.It does not resume playback when you stop a movie and restart it.Originally it didn't allow you to FF and Rew worth a damn...that has been updated.I would hold off as you already have a functional player....wait to see what we get from Boxee and Google.
A**I
We waited months for this junk!!
I can understand to a degree some people praise this as a simple box that plays "MOST" media files but C'mon!! If I wanted a simple box and didn't care about UI, Scraping, ETC...I would have kept my WD TV Live Plus.There is no way, this company (Syabas) can claim they didn't overhype this product. A couple of apps, sluggish UI, no Netflix, a power cable that doesn't fit right, half a$$ meta data scraping, missing audio channels, no bitstreaming of high def audio, system runs extremely hot, ETC....ETC.....read other reviews, I can attest they are all true.I know many are saying this is a $130 box no biggie but seriously......I didn't sign up to be one of their free Beta Testers!!This thing should have been in the works for another 6-12 months easy before it hit the streets. As consumers of electronic gadgets, I really feel that we need to send a message to Syabas, that we won't buy your overpriced junk if it isn't ready to go.....I say send them all back and let them know they have a responsibility to their customers to give us a product worth our hard earned cash!!Never again Syabas!! - Plex and XBMC smoke this peice of junk any day!! P.S. Plex and XBMC are Free :)
