Friday, May 14, 2010

Popcorn Hour A200

I got fed up with waiting for Syabas to provide a firmware release for the A100 to playback AAC-HE LATM audio so picked up an A200 player which handles this audio format and also has HDMI 1.3 so it can process bitstreamed lossless audio.

Alas this hasn't been the greatest move. Firstly while it does playback the AAC audio now, it cannot playback lossless audio in a MKV, ts or m2ts container because of a but in the Sigma chipset or SDK. The only way it can handle lossless audio is if the ts files are wrapped in a BDMV folder which means more work to prepare for them the server. And I am also now experiencing random network issues where playback of HD content will stop randomly, freeze and the Popcorn will lose the share off the server - none of which happened with the A100.

Even moving from HD Powerline to 100Mbs ethernet has not fixed this issue. I was about to RMA the device but was advised by Tech Support to wait for the latest firmware which might fix this problem. It arrived today (15 May) I have installed it and initial experiences are positive. I was able to watch a ts stream at 4500kbs streamed over Powerline HD to the server and then via 100Mbs ethernet to the Popcorn with no problems.

Next step is to see how it handles a MKV stream.

No comments: