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Product Specifications
Brand Namepopbox
Color NameBlack
Technical Details
- Stunning HD Video: Displays the best HD quality on your HDTV via HDMI / Component Video outputs and extensive codec support.
- Simple and affordable to play all the movies, home videos, photos, and music stored on your home PC on your HDTV
- Simple and Easy to Setup and Operate
- Enjoy the Best of Internet Movies, Videos, Sports, and More
- An Unbeatable Price: No one else offers this many features for one low price with no monthly fees!
Product Details
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Product Description
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 Music
For 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 Receiver
You 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 Internet
You 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 PopBox
PopBox 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.
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!
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
67 of 72 people found the following review helpful
Amazon Verified Purchase
I ordered the Popbox during a brief availability window on April 7th shortly after learning that the box would be delayed to get the software right. Syabas, the makers of the Popbox said they needed more time to get the software solid before shipping the product and that it would ship on July 23rd. Imagine my surprise when I got a shipping notice on July 15th that it had gone out from Amazon.
According to the Popbox folks, the first batch of units made their way through customs 'faster than expected' and although they did not say so, this seemed to be used as a hedge against any negative reviews that these initial units received. Now if you really believe that the Popbox would have been 'ready' by July 23rd, well, I've got some swamp land to sell you.
From a purely hardware perspective the Popbox is a very nice little unit. It is compact and pleasing to look at and will integrate well in an AV stack. The remote control is serviceable and backlit which is a plus. The unit even ships with an HDMI cable.
When I initially turned the box on I was pretty pleasantly surprised with the quality of the graphics and user interface as it ran out and updated firmware and then rebooted a couple of times. It is absolutely critical to have the SD card that ships in the box inserted into the Popbox when turning it on. It stores database information here and will not work properly if it is missing.
Unfortunately my positive experience with the Popbox ended with the initial peek at the snazzy UI. Just about everything you do with Popbox reeks of half baked badness and piss poor planning. I have a large collection of BD discs that are ripped to .mkv format sitting out on a network share on a Windows Home Server. There were no instructions provided so I had to poke and prod through the interface for a very long period of time to ultimately get the Popbox to see these files. Then, after the files showed up it was another painful trip through the interface to see that I had to add this 'share' I had set up as a 'media' source. Then I had to re-add this share as a media source a 2nd time because the first time the Popbox failed to properly download the movie data for the files.
Now, here is where it gets interesting. All I need the Popbox to do is play my movies. I don't plan to use it really for anything else such as playback of TV shows, playback of my large photo library, online services like Youtube and Flickr. It would be cool to use all of those things but ultimately I just wanted a box that was cheap and could playback my large collection of BD images without issues.
How does the Popbox do at this? Two words; Epic Fail.
The first little nitpick is that the database that the Popbox builds for your movies is solely based on what it finds in IMDB. It doesn't let you build your own info files with any media management programs. As all of my movies already have info files for them as well as my own cover artwork, fan art, etc, it is really annoying that it builds this database with no user control and in many cases shows poor artwork for the title, etc.
When you play a media file back with the Popbox you will notice a few things right away;
1. Subtitles aren't working and are not supported. This is a real headache if you want to watch any movies that require subtitles like District 9 or Avatar. What's worse is that Popbox tech support have said that .sub/.idx subtitles will be supported in a future release, but they will not say if they will ever support .PGS subtitles. All Blu-ray titles have PGS subs and most media players are now supporting PGS subs. Popbox apparently won't, which stinks. Worse they support NO subtitles at all.
2. Chapter support is not there for MKV.
3. No fast forward or rewind other than 2X or 4X. Popbox support says that this will be improved in firmware coming out today. I should point out though that when you fast forward or rewind you don't even get an on screen display of what the machine is doing, so you can't see what speed it is fast forward or rewinding at and you can't see a scrubber or timecode bar that shows you where in the film you are. Lame.
4. No audio track selection. If you need or want to change audio tracks when playing a movie, too bad, there's no way to do it.
5. Now this is a big one. VC1 video codec playback is broken when playing .mkv files. I have a lot of my movies in VC1 format and they all stutter badly when played on the Popbox. Other file types work fine so I know it's not the network connection, my server, etc. This means you can forget watching Harry Potter, Bourne, Lord of the Rings or any other titles encoded this way. Popbox support hasn't said a thing about if and when this will be fixed.
So, in a nutshell, the Popbox can't play my movies reliably, has no chapter support, no subtitle support, and really crappy user feedback while viewing a movie.
This is basic stuff that should be working 100% when the box is shipped. Syabas, the makers of the Popbox brought the original Network Media Tank to the market over two years ago. You would think they would have this stuff down by now OR would have enough common sense to hold off on releasing it with so many visible and annoying bugs.
Other nits and annoyances;
1. The Popbox never really turns off. When you 'power it down' it simply turns the screen off but continues running and using power. I don't need a box sucking down power all the time when I'm not using it.
2. The ethernet lights continue to blink away which is annoying in a dark room at night (like when I'm sleeping).
3. The box randomly doesn't turn on and you have to power cycle it. Twice now I have hit the power button on the Popbox and been greeted with a black screen. No buttons work and I have to physically reboot the box or press the reset button to get it to come back up.
4. It is SLOW. I have 200 movies and the user interface only shows eight of them at a time. Paging through them is tedious.
5. There is no categorization of your movies. The Popbox scrapes genre information and information like the director from IMDB but there's no way to use this to sort the list of titles and just view your 'action' titles for example.
6. TV show support/scraping is pretty much nonexistent at this point. If you want to play episodes of a TV show you can forget using the nice UI, you will have to use the file browser to see them in the correct order.
7. Audio support is lacking. The unit does not have lossless audio format support, has issues with channel mapping and of course as previously mentioned has no way of selecting the audio track within a title.
8. DVD ISO movie menus don't appear to be working when I play a DVD ISO file.
9. The network browser was completely unable to show my network shares or connect to them properly over SMB. This is something more or less every other media player can do and is simply ridiculous. I had to explicitly go in and build the share by pointing straight to the IP of my server with a name and password set up as well as the share name. Inexcusable.
The list goes on and on but you get the picture.
Is this the most horrible device I've ever used? No. Does it have 'potential'? Yes. However, you should only consider purchasing one if you want to be an unpaid Beta tester who forked over your own hard earned money to play with this thing while they fix the bugs (if they ever even do fix all the bugs). By purchasing it and not returning it you are doing something else. You are encouraging these companies to continue to shove this garbage at us, with tons of bugs and issues, and hope they will eventually fix the problems. I find this rather inexcusable, especially after all of the broken promises, long delays, etc, from these guys.
I have been accused in some forums of being 'too hard' on the poor Popbox. Give me a break. I'm a telecom engineer with 14 years of professional experience. If the company I worked for released a product in this state my customers would eat me alive and justifiably so. I know what it takes to get products working, and it's clear that Syabas, the makers of Popbox do not. For whatever reason, such as lack of attention to detail, insufficient help, crappy programmer skills, etc, they have released this thing when it's no where near done. I purchased this thing with pretty simple requirements and WANTED it to work. It can't even play my movie collection which is the only thing I need it to do. Forget about all the other broken stuff, they can't even do the one thing they should be doing out of the gate.
Enough said, this piece of crap is going back.
According to the Popbox folks, the first batch of units made their way through customs 'faster than expected' and although they did not say so, this seemed to be used as a hedge against any negative reviews that these initial units received. Now if you really believe that the Popbox would have been 'ready' by July 23rd, well, I've got some swamp land to sell you.
From a purely hardware perspective the Popbox is a very nice little unit. It is compact and pleasing to look at and will integrate well in an AV stack. The remote control is serviceable and backlit which is a plus. The unit even ships with an HDMI cable.
When I initially turned the box on I was pretty pleasantly surprised with the quality of the graphics and user interface as it ran out and updated firmware and then rebooted a couple of times. It is absolutely critical to have the SD card that ships in the box inserted into the Popbox when turning it on. It stores database information here and will not work properly if it is missing.
Unfortunately my positive experience with the Popbox ended with the initial peek at the snazzy UI. Just about everything you do with Popbox reeks of half baked badness and piss poor planning. I have a large collection of BD discs that are ripped to .mkv format sitting out on a network share on a Windows Home Server. There were no instructions provided so I had to poke and prod through the interface for a very long period of time to ultimately get the Popbox to see these files. Then, after the files showed up it was another painful trip through the interface to see that I had to add this 'share' I had set up as a 'media' source. Then I had to re-add this share as a media source a 2nd time because the first time the Popbox failed to properly download the movie data for the files.
Now, here is where it gets interesting. All I need the Popbox to do is play my movies. I don't plan to use it really for anything else such as playback of TV shows, playback of my large photo library, online services like Youtube and Flickr. It would be cool to use all of those things but ultimately I just wanted a box that was cheap and could playback my large collection of BD images without issues.
How does the Popbox do at this? Two words; Epic Fail.
The first little nitpick is that the database that the Popbox builds for your movies is solely based on what it finds in IMDB. It doesn't let you build your own info files with any media management programs. As all of my movies already have info files for them as well as my own cover artwork, fan art, etc, it is really annoying that it builds this database with no user control and in many cases shows poor artwork for the title, etc.
When you play a media file back with the Popbox you will notice a few things right away;
1. Subtitles aren't working and are not supported. This is a real headache if you want to watch any movies that require subtitles like District 9 or Avatar. What's worse is that Popbox tech support have said that .sub/.idx subtitles will be supported in a future release, but they will not say if they will ever support .PGS subtitles. All Blu-ray titles have PGS subs and most media players are now supporting PGS subs. Popbox apparently won't, which stinks. Worse they support NO subtitles at all.
2. Chapter support is not there for MKV.
3. No fast forward or rewind other than 2X or 4X. Popbox support says that this will be improved in firmware coming out today. I should point out though that when you fast forward or rewind you don't even get an on screen display of what the machine is doing, so you can't see what speed it is fast forward or rewinding at and you can't see a scrubber or timecode bar that shows you where in the film you are. Lame.
4. No audio track selection. If you need or want to change audio tracks when playing a movie, too bad, there's no way to do it.
5. Now this is a big one. VC1 video codec playback is broken when playing .mkv files. I have a lot of my movies in VC1 format and they all stutter badly when played on the Popbox. Other file types work fine so I know it's not the network connection, my server, etc. This means you can forget watching Harry Potter, Bourne, Lord of the Rings or any other titles encoded this way. Popbox support hasn't said a thing about if and when this will be fixed.
So, in a nutshell, the Popbox can't play my movies reliably, has no chapter support, no subtitle support, and really crappy user feedback while viewing a movie.
This is basic stuff that should be working 100% when the box is shipped. Syabas, the makers of the Popbox brought the original Network Media Tank to the market over two years ago. You would think they would have this stuff down by now OR would have enough common sense to hold off on releasing it with so many visible and annoying bugs.
Other nits and annoyances;
1. The Popbox never really turns off. When you 'power it down' it simply turns the screen off but continues running and using power. I don't need a box sucking down power all the time when I'm not using it.
2. The ethernet lights continue to blink away which is annoying in a dark room at night (like when I'm sleeping).
3. The box randomly doesn't turn on and you have to power cycle it. Twice now I have hit the power button on the Popbox and been greeted with a black screen. No buttons work and I have to physically reboot the box or press the reset button to get it to come back up.
4. It is SLOW. I have 200 movies and the user interface only shows eight of them at a time. Paging through them is tedious.
5. There is no categorization of your movies. The Popbox scrapes genre information and information like the director from IMDB but there's no way to use this to sort the list of titles and just view your 'action' titles for example.
6. TV show support/scraping is pretty much nonexistent at this point. If you want to play episodes of a TV show you can forget using the nice UI, you will have to use the file browser to see them in the correct order.
7. Audio support is lacking. The unit does not have lossless audio format support, has issues with channel mapping and of course as previously mentioned has no way of selecting the audio track within a title.
8. DVD ISO movie menus don't appear to be working when I play a DVD ISO file.
9. The network browser was completely unable to show my network shares or connect to them properly over SMB. This is something more or less every other media player can do and is simply ridiculous. I had to explicitly go in and build the share by pointing straight to the IP of my server with a name and password set up as well as the share name. Inexcusable.
The list goes on and on but you get the picture.
Is this the most horrible device I've ever used? No. Does it have 'potential'? Yes. However, you should only consider purchasing one if you want to be an unpaid Beta tester who forked over your own hard earned money to play with this thing while they fix the bugs (if they ever even do fix all the bugs). By purchasing it and not returning it you are doing something else. You are encouraging these companies to continue to shove this garbage at us, with tons of bugs and issues, and hope they will eventually fix the problems. I find this rather inexcusable, especially after all of the broken promises, long delays, etc, from these guys.
I have been accused in some forums of being 'too hard' on the poor Popbox. Give me a break. I'm a telecom engineer with 14 years of professional experience. If the company I worked for released a product in this state my customers would eat me alive and justifiably so. I know what it takes to get products working, and it's clear that Syabas, the makers of Popbox do not. For whatever reason, such as lack of attention to detail, insufficient help, crappy programmer skills, etc, they have released this thing when it's no where near done. I purchased this thing with pretty simple requirements and WANTED it to work. It can't even play my movie collection which is the only thing I need it to do. Forget about all the other broken stuff, they can't even do the one thing they should be doing out of the gate.
Enough said, this piece of crap is going back.
40 of 47 people found the following review helpful
Amazon Verified Purchase
Almost every con is being worked on by Syabas they have taken notice to the problems and all major fixes can be done with software. The Hardware is amazing for the price and I do agree with everyone you should wait until the cons are fixed before you buy.
Pros
1.$129 on launch
2.UI is faster then I expected
3.First mediabox to have IMDB scalping native
4.Search option
5.Can browse file structure to play movies as well as the cover art
6.Backlit remote control
7.Plays all files I have tried
Cons and Known Issues, as of 18 July 2010, 300 MST
- Audio: missing channels, particularly the center channel, during video playback
- Audio: PCM vs. standard DTS/DD 5.1 output
- Audio: No bitstreaming support for TrueHD and DTS-HD MA
- Audio: After switching from Music to Movies, then starting a movie, the previous music selection starts playing again along with the movie audio.
- Video: Black/blank screens after hitting play
- Video: Audio starting without video
- UI: No customization of UI only 8 movies listed per page
- UI: After exiting a movie, the focus frame is not present and always returns to first movie in library
- UI: Inability to sort movies by genre/category, or jump to specific places in large libraries
- UI: TV show scraping and listing is poorly executed (Almost completely unusable?).
- Design: Power cord connection is loose, or "shallow"
- Design: USB port located too close to power port
- Design: No way to actually restart or power-off the device without unpluging
- Playback: Info does not show remaining time left on video
- Playback: Movies starting over from beginning after stopping
- Playback: FastForward 4x max
- Playback: Lack of subtitle toggle
- Playback: Lack of audio track selection
- Playback: No chapter skipping or "jumps" forward/back (hold left and right to do this but no display shown)
- Support: Lack of dedicated support forum
- Support: Lack of Memory Management or Info
- Support: Lack of Netflix, Pandora, LastFM, and many more.
Pros
1.$129 on launch
2.UI is faster then I expected
3.First mediabox to have IMDB scalping native
4.Search option
5.Can browse file structure to play movies as well as the cover art
6.Backlit remote control
7.Plays all files I have tried
Cons and Known Issues, as of 18 July 2010, 300 MST
- Audio: missing channels, particularly the center channel, during video playback
- Audio: PCM vs. standard DTS/DD 5.1 output
- Audio: No bitstreaming support for TrueHD and DTS-HD MA
- Audio: After switching from Music to Movies, then starting a movie, the previous music selection starts playing again along with the movie audio.
- Video: Black/blank screens after hitting play
- Video: Audio starting without video
- UI: No customization of UI only 8 movies listed per page
- UI: After exiting a movie, the focus frame is not present and always returns to first movie in library
- UI: Inability to sort movies by genre/category, or jump to specific places in large libraries
- UI: TV show scraping and listing is poorly executed (Almost completely unusable?).
- Design: Power cord connection is loose, or "shallow"
- Design: USB port located too close to power port
- Design: No way to actually restart or power-off the device without unpluging
- Playback: Info does not show remaining time left on video
- Playback: Movies starting over from beginning after stopping
- Playback: FastForward 4x max
- Playback: Lack of subtitle toggle
- Playback: Lack of audio track selection
- Playback: No chapter skipping or "jumps" forward/back (hold left and right to do this but no display shown)
- Support: Lack of dedicated support forum
- Support: Lack of Memory Management or Info
- Support: Lack of Netflix, Pandora, LastFM, and many more.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
no more Syabas
that the last crap product of this compagny, no more news firmware a lot of bugs , very bad experience the next one is a htpc whit xbmc on it, i am tire of nmj crash
Published 4 months ago by ron
THIS UNIT NEEDS A LOT OF WORK!!!!!
I'M ENJOYING THIS PRODUCT. BEST PART ISO FILES AND 3D CAPABILITIES, BUT UNFORTUNATELY IS CONSTANTLY CRUSHING DOWN BECAUSE OF HEAT PROBLEM (NEEDS A FAN TO COOL IT DOWN). Read more
Published 9 months ago by Christian D
Popbox utterly FAILS to deliver!
I fully agree with all of the critical reviews presented here and can only advise NOT to purchase the product.
Published 17 months ago by Alex Julien
Very good now, close to great.
I bought one on release, what a mistake! But with the recent firmware release, I have a new winner in the house. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Jdgping
Great product!!!
Great product!!! With the new firmware updates this is finally the product we all thought it would be. Plays all the video I've thrown at it without a problem. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Satisfied customer
Only so so after all the hype
It works well on a basic media player level and never stutters over the network, but it regularly freezes and doesn't have any of the functionality originally hyped on initial... Read more
Published 17 months ago by mbeebe
Plays everything, low cost, this is just the beggining of a great...
Plays everything, lowest cost out there, this is just the beggining of a great player. Those giving bad reviews for this product will very soon change their minds. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Myself
Wasted money - I hate this thing
I preordered this thing based on it's hype, hardware looks, and the Syabas name. I hate it. The interface is terrible, others have said enough detail about it. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Jammer777
This product is not ready
I wish I could give a glowing review of this product but alas all of the hype turned out to be just that. Read more
Published 19 months ago by Luft
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... Read more
Published 20 months ago by Jennifer Haynes
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