Popcorn Hour C200 Networked Media Tank/HTPC

Sounds to good to be true…

Now that we have moved from the hardware its time to take a look at what will inevitably be used the most, the user interface. Below is a short video overview of the user interface.

Popcorn Hour C200 Interface run through

I have heard a lot of complaints over the design of the user interface, saying that it was confusing and outdated. My personal thoughts on the user interface are that the interface is very easy to use, it flows very well and can be quite snappy when it wants to be…. which brings me to my biggest grief, the firmware behind the user interface is very buggy….

Let me elaborate on why I say this. In my experience with the general UI, I have found that it will hang from time to time and you may as well walk away and get a sandwich during some of the wait times. The lengthy delay appears random, there are times when it is very slow to load and other times the transition would be instantaneous even while reading from the internal drive that I installed. The cause of these random pauses is baffling and unfortunately not the worst issues I ran into… Rarer than the pauses but no less baffling are the sudden hard locks that will grip the device and that will last up to a half hour (30 minutes) during the past week. With both the original firmware and the latest one I have had no less than 6 hard locks, after 30mins I would shut the device down using the switch located on the back of the power supply. Hard locks much like the random pauses appear to be random in nature and my best guess are a product of beta firmware these issues should be fixed as the firmware for the C200 matures.

When the Popcorn hour C200 worked, it would work amazingly well. The interface would be snappy, files would load with gusto and the device would behave the way a production product should; For the most part the c200 behaved just the way it should, it was the times that the device didn’t cooperate that made my overall enjoyment of its abundant features diminish.

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