PopBox Owners' Thread: Impressions, Reviews & Tips - Page 10

blackssr, I am anxiously awaiting your review. have you tried the fw fix?

Damn right!

You'd expect a company that makes boxes already that work perfect would come out with something better than this.

I'm lurking here reading others' experiences before my Popbox shows up on Monday...

My one big question is this: are you REQUIRED to use the scan feature or can you just navigate a directory tree?

I ask because i have SEVERAL terabytes of TV shows and movies and wouldn't want to sit there for hours while it scrapes my whole freaking network...

I don't have enough experience with the simle menus since I usually have my C200 set for full BD menu navigation. The titles I've used for the simple menu did not have multiple versions.

And on the PopBox, I don't see off hand how to get into the simple BD menu like I can with my A200/C200.

Right now I'm transferring some more things to my WD passport. A couple of DVD ISOs, and a couple more BD ISOs. But it takes a while at only 300mbs to 350mbs over the USB connection to the WD drive. Normally I'm used to 700mbs speeds from the NAS I'm copying from. But that is to internal SATA drives.

Can I get some of that Pixie Dust!

Kudos... and thank you.

Now... on to recovery and testing.

Working on it as I type this.

Mike

Again...honestly...I am seeing some real idiocy here. Yes, the thing sounds half-baked; but you don't make it better when you are a brand new poster, and you come in saying something like "the audio doesn't work through HDMI". Uh...did you set the audio to come out through HDMI? Because I haven't had the pleasure of hooking mine up yet, but I'd be willing to bet you the price of your re-stocking that audio comes out through HDMI for heaven's sake.

Now, if what you mean is it isn't passing a certain codec, or something...then you should say that. Otherwise...again, honestly...all I see is someone who is probably shilling for the competition, by coming in and saying the most ridiculous things they can think of.

Oh, and while we're at it: what do some of you newbies mean by "bricked"? Do you mean it's "frozen"? "Frozen" can be fixed; "frozen" happens all the time. Man, talk about impatient. "I got this a week early...I plugged it in and it didn't work in 5 minutes. F*ck Syabas...this thing is going back".

And while I'm venting...lol; guys, seriously...can't you see we're fighting for our lives here. Questions like "can someone see how it's scrapping TV show data" is a little premature at this point, yes? Why don't we get the thing stable, and then we'll see if it differentiates between theatrical and directorial releases of your BD rip.

CD

I dont pull stuff out of my Arse.. yes i set it to do just that, it doesnt do it.. someone else already posted it only gets pcm thru hdmi at the most.

As for waiting.. WHY?!?! they went thru all of these problems with the A-100 A-110 and C-200 .. why start from scratch reinventing the wheel? just to have a nice UI?? come on.
give me a break..

if it wasnt ready dont release it. It should work! at least as they advertised and minor bugs fixed or things added as it goes, but not problems OFF THE BAT as you plug the darn thing in.

And what competition your talking about??? XBMC? people working for FREE and getting it right? OFF THE BAT?

OK...but that's different than "no audio" now, isn't it. Look, I'm not going to pick individual fights; tensions are understandably high. I just think some people are taking a measured approach, and have some legitimate complaints and observations...and some are just being unreasonable. JMO

I call it like I see it, good and bad. This was released half-baked, Syabas has kicked the whole release around a bit, and now has gotten caught with its pants down. That being said, I think they've responded remarkably fast. They have a man in this forum, they have posted the firmware and recovery. Does it deserve a weekend for heaven's sake?

I'll be taking a run at mine first thing in the morning, over a nice, big cup of coffee.

CD

You said it, not me. At least we know what axe you're grinding. And FWIW, I run XBMC and love it. So you see I have no agenda.

CD

oh god. my amazon box is here! dO I open it? Or do I go watch a movie with the wife and wait for someone to fix all of the stuff...
choices..

Hey bro...

Open and test it out.

The C-200 will get the same interface

wife pissed me off so I popped in the sd card and hooked it up. it seems to be downloading and installing stuff...
more to come

as we speak. I use a toshiba 32" 1080p television as my monitor so am flipping back and forth on the hdmi inputs. at "programming firmware 80%"
I really want to like this thing...

So I have been messing with the Popbox Wireless for the last hour now. So far so good.

I have about 4 tb worth of HD movies all saved as .mkv and I simply added it to the Media Library in the settings and it started to scan the My Book World Edition II. Now the movies are showing up along with cover art all fetched from IMDB.

Some covers are wrong and you can edit them by searching for the right cover and selecting it.

I am streaming 1080p movies with no issues at all. Non like I initially had with my WDTV lives. It found my network asked for my key and that was really it.

Soundcast app does not seem to be working correctly as it keeps resetting the box. But YouTube works along with Twitter and Weatherbug.

I do notice my Pioneer VSX-1018AH is no longer displaying DTS and now displays PCM. It used to display DTS with the WDTV Live.

I need to hook the other one up but so far I really like it. Overall it looks ok...nothing that blows me away but I do like the way the movies are displayed.

Oh yeah there are no instructions besides the quick setup guide.

Many are complaining on Amazon about their wired versions too. So far no disconnects either.

downloading recovery now for mine. If it fixes it i'll be happy and be very thankful to the popbox folks. I know mine wasn't a fluke with as many people having issues. Mine even worked fine till it decided to do a 2nd update. I haven't had time to play with it or do much yet so I can't rate it other then almost brick out of the box, I do like the interface though.

Open it.

Although I noticed with mine I went to the Apps page and it said that it couldn't retrieve that app categories from the server. When I was looking at it before I only downloaded the revision 3 APP. I guess I should have downloaded more while they were up. I'll have to try it again later.

OK...

Got up and running.

Setting up shares was a slight challenge but got the player to see the shares off my Raid 5 32TB array with WHS server. I am only testing network performance because that is all I am interested in. I would think if network performance is smooth the local should be the same.

I have set up a test share just to test the performance of my ripped ISOs. As many of you know I rip all my BD without menus, extras or trailers. I use BD Clown with ANYDVD HD to create a ripped ISO with just Movie, Hidef Audio and Subs. Nothing more nothing less.

The first movie I tested was Avatar which has a DTS MA HD Audio and Forced Subs. The Audio was passed to my Denon 5308Ci as PCM and seemed to play without stutter. I only watched a few minutes of it to check the sub titles and the forced subs all work. The remote does not advance chapters at all and FF only has 2 speeds.

The Second movie I tested was a Neil Diamond concert which has a TrueHD soundtract. The audio was passed as PCM to my Denon and seemed to play fine and without stutter. Again please realize I only watched a few minutes to get you guys some information. The auto framerate did switch to 60hz thus video was choppy. I switched manual and all was good.

The remote is lighted and feels good but lacking some key features and chapter advance does not work with my ripped ISOs.

I am ripping a full ISO as I type this and will report back with menu performance if it works at all.

Also.. I quickly tested 2012 and and its DTS MA HD 7.1. This was passed as 7.1 PCM to my Denon5308CI.

I do not see any setting for Bitstreaming Audio. All I see is Stereo 5.1 and 2 channel. Yet it passes 7.1 PCM. Strange.

It does not HD DVD ISOs at all. Player froze when I tried.

I hope this helps some of you decide if this player is for you.

Mike

So on arrival, my Popbox was a useless black box. It would power on, even make it to the menus, but then would lock up. I unplugged several times, still did the same thing. Thankfully, I saw the link to the updated firmware, and that fixed everything. It's not the prettiest UI, but it is very fast. I was even impressed that it was Roku snappy when getting to such things as Revision 3 shows. And it does play the Panasonic Nature file with no problem that many media players struggle with.

Here is what I don't like: No fastforward speed listed during use, and paging doesn't seem to work on my media list (although it scrolls very fast).

You won't get the BD menus from a BD ISO. It will just start playing the movie.

The couple of DVD ISOs I tried had the full menus. I tried the Animatrix DVD and a Stargate DVD.

That sounds great. When is it happening?

There are only two speeds so there really is no need to list them. If you want to see the speeds you need to hit the info button. Then it will show 2X and 4X when you FF.

Also to get to the DVD menus from DVD ISOs, when you hit the Info button, you need to highlight " DVD menu" on the far right an dthen you can access the DVD menu.
With BD ISO, there is no menu listed there. And one isn't expected since it works similar to the A200 with BD ISOs.
Although with the A200 you can still pick the audio tracks etc, and I don't see that option on the BD ISos.

I also need to check a couple of BD ISOs I have that show the menus even when only using BD Lie. I know my Chriss Botti BDs will do it and my Baraka BD ISO offhand.

Don't know i'm not syabas but you can follow this forum.

http://www.networkedmediatank.com/sh....php?tid=39284

If will show you the interface and what they are working on.

oK so confirmed by another no DTS via HDMI Port.

And? You are a troll... All 7 of your posts were a complete waste time and effort.

anybody got tru-hd working?
I also played with a couple mkv files. Star Trek Nemesi played fine Dark Knight skipped like crazy. No Blu ray menus on full iso images. Will have to take it downstairs to see if it is passing HBR audio...
No way to change audio on bluray rips that i can see...

Anyone tried PlayOn yet?