Customer Reviews

PopBox Media Player

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(48)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

To begin--know that Syabas missed two of it's own, self-determined deadlines prior to releasing the Popbox. Two. In January 2010, they bandied about the Netflix name. Slowly, Netflix vanished. Finally, the box rolled out.

I still bought it. And, it's still half-baked.

Syabas lavished attention on the simple UI. That's about it--all effort appears to have gone into appearance, not function.

The consumer-centric box is supposed to automatically detect all media on the home network. It doesn't. Unless, that is, you've got a USB drive directly connected to the box (note that while the Popbox can "see" the network no other devices can "see" it; any USB attached to the device is dedicated to it--essentially wasted storage). It took three days and a call from "level 3" tech support to guide the box to media on my NAS, my Xtreamer, an XP Pro PC, and a Windows 7 PC.

Turns out, Popbox doesn't support UPNP. I had to disable this function on all network devices in order to "see" media files on them. Ludicrous.

When media was, finally, located the "aggregator" began to function. It swept up a large but random sample of media on the network and lobbed it into the UI. Roughly forty percent of the movies that did show were mis-tagged/labeled. To this day Tropic Thunder registers as Malcolm X. A third of the movies didn't show at all. I converted all my movies from .ifo/.vob format into .iso. More showed, not all. I then created NFO files per Popbox guide. No luck. At one point, all the movies in the folder took on the traits designated in the first NFO folder. I had 97 versions of the movie 300.

You can't edit video or photo files via the UI. You can't delete or move them. Once a file shows on the UI, it is stuck. The Popbox supposed to scan the network at set intervals and reflect changes in file system. It doesn't.

There is no option to view or sort by any tag--including genre.

The box gathered all the album art and dvd poster jpegs, lobbing them in with the family pictures. Again, no ability to edit or remove via the UI. Great to see my two year old appear next to a Slim Shady image.

I have ~3000 songs (20GB) of music. It took over three hours for the box to generate 13 "pages" of music. Moving from one page to another takes a full 5-10 seconds. It takes a full three minutes to find Mozart starting at Bach. Initially the box could only play one song at a time on an album. A firmware update permits continuous play. Except now, after finally arriving at an album, I'll select Mozart only to hear Outkast's Stankonia.

If I manually navigate to the actual folder/file I cannot play the entire album. I am again stuck playing one song at a time.

Tropic Thunder-Malcolm X. Mozart-Oukast. That about captures the product.

There is no off button. The unit remains on, permanently. It hangs and freezes often. I've learned to power cycle it before attempting to watch play anything. I've emptied and re-scanned the media library multiple times to get it to "see" what it misses. Each time it picks up new media and loses other media. It randomly plays the .mov format. After the 7/27 update it stopped playing the .iso/.vob format at all. When the function returned frame rate malfunctioned.

I correctly figured the update caused the trouble only to find out Popbox offers no option to roll back updates. You're stuck with what Syabas pushes out, automatically, from the home office. Every other electronic device I own permits the owner to manually adjust firmware.

And . . . no Netflix. You can check the weather via Weatherbug.

I printed out the Amazon return label after my final interaction with tech support. On 8/4 they promised to send a new remote. On 8/10 I called. They promised it was in the mail. On 8/17, they "discovered" a change in policy and offered to replace the remote only after receiving/inspecting the malfunctioning remote. I've sent three emails. One garnered a response.

The UI is slick. The concept is intelligent. Execution borders on inept.

Its got to be an embarassment for Syabas to have foisted this on Amazon. It's more embarrassing for me to have purchased such shoddy tech without . . . waiting, at least.

Look at the Amazon rating! Barely two stars--less for the wireless version. Skip the Popbox. Get the WD HD-TV Live for less money.

I'm exchanging it for an Xtreamer Sidewinder or Pro. Though it was a frustrating wait, Xtreamer took its time. The Xtreamer Movie Jukebox just nails it. Dolby 7.1 is supported. Xtreamer will soon feature a fully functional version of the Opera web browser (Netflix AND Hulu AND . . . you name it).

The software inside this box is so riddled with bugs and missing features that it should never have been released. It is easily the worst piece of consumer electronics I have ever had the displeasure of using. I would strongly encourage anyone considering purchasing a Popbox to find an alternative.

Releasing something so obviously unfinished indicates that the manufacturer of this box has no respect for their customers. Here is a small sampling of the problems I encountered while using it:

A inconsistent and frustrating UI design.
Adding my pictures and videos taken on my digicam rendered the display of movie titles and other metadata useless.
Many, many UI bugs.
No Netflix or any other premium VOD service such as Amazon or Vudu.
The YouTube app would neither install or uninstall, thus I could not use it.
The Weatherbug app causes the box to reboot and looks like it was designed by a 3yr old.
No way to fast forward by more than 4x, meaning it would take you 15 minutes to forward to the 1hr mark of a movie!
No support for subtitles.

There is no end to this horror show. Do not buy it.

I wish I could give a glowing review of this product but alas all of the hype turned out to be just that.

I can tell you that whoever developed the user interface didn't do a good job. I simply don't understand how any company could release a product that is so hopelessly buggy. If they had spent even twenty minutes actually trying to use this product they would never have let it out the door.

Scrolling through anything except a tiny library of movies is excruciatingly slow. They use a SQLite database that should make searching very fast but apparently their programmers can't handle that either. I looked at the their sql tables and they don't appear to be properly normalized. Parts of them look like someone who didn't have a clue about using a relational database decided to use it like he would a flat file system.

When trying to scroll though a large movie library be prepared to wait at the |||LOADING||| screen a lot!! It does not appear that the software loads any of the cover art ahead of time so it's: Press the page down button, wait for the page to paint, press the page down button, wait for the page to paint. Sometimes you'll be lucky and the page will take a second or two to paint, sometimes you won't be so lucky and it can take 30 seconds or more to paint.

I usually give up on the cover art and go to the menu option that allows me to browes the files in a list format. But that isn't any picnic either. I have my TV shows in directories. Sometimes the listings will get out of sync so maybe the directory will be for F-Troop but the files being shown are for Gilligan's Island.

In fairness I do believe that all of the problems are with the software so they can be corrected. I just do not have confidence that the programmer's have the skills needed to do the job. If I were Syabas I would fire the lot of them and pony up the money to get real programmers who actually have experience and know how to code this type of application. It feels to me like they have been using second year students.

I selected this product because it has all of the features I was looking for. I watched the blogs, hoping that the next firmware release would support enough of the advertised features. However, after the Popbox team went silent, I decided to return my unit and wait for the firmware to mature. If the features are supported, I will definitely re-purchase.

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. It runs hot and I am afraid it's going to burn out any day. I have yet to see any firmware updates. What a complete waste of time. Makes my Asus O!Play look good, and I thought THAT was crap. :(

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.

Unfortunately while the product holds out a lot of promise it isn't there yet - by a long shot.

Clunky, slow UI
Videos stop & stutter depending on codec
Youtube freezes for me regularly
Network setup a chore
Media library not well organized

etc.

Buyer beware