PopBox Media Player Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)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.

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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!

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