Review of the Popcorn Hour C-200 as a Networked Blu-ray player

The Popcorn Hour C-200 is a new Network Media Player, launched as a follow-up to the successful A-series players (A-100 and A-110).

Popcorn Hour C-200

The A-series machines were known as the “swiss Army knives” of the media players — they played just about everything. The new C-200 introduced a new Sigma processor, a bay for a BD-ROM or 3.5″ hard drive as well as space for a 2.5″ drive, internal USB port, RF remote and a number of other new features.
The main raison d’etre for the C-200 over the A-110 is Blu-ray playback.

As a new device on the market, there have only been a few, brief reviews, and the manufacturers have publically admitted that the firmware is a “work-in-progress”.

With that in mind, I approached the setup of my new C-200 with some trepidation!

Background

I have been a videophile for many years, starting in 1992 with purchase of a laserdisc player and a Dolby Pro Logic amp. I always strive to watch movies at the highest quality possible.

I have a large collection of movies, mainly HD. My main use for the C-200 will be to play completely untouched Blu-ray disc “rips” stored on network servers.
Many people with HD movies prefer recoded Blu-ray rips that have been encoded with x264 or similar codecs so they take up less room.

Equipment used during the review

• Popcorn Hour C-200
• IRK-200 infra-red kit
• Popcorn Hour A-110
• Onkyo TX-SR606 A/V amplifier
• Sanyo Z2000 1080p projector
• 110″ Owl Electric projection screen
• Celestion AVF302s/AVP303, subwoofer
• Harmony infra-red remotes
• 16TB unRAID server (Samba, NFS, llink)
• Buffalo LinkStation Live NAS (Samba, llink)
• Seagate portable USB drive
• Kingston 64GB USB flash drive
• Samsung Spinpoint 320GB 7200rpm SATA drive (C-200 internal)
• Netgear DG834PN router with 4x 10/100 ports
• Netgear GS108 gigabit switch (metal case)

In this initial review/assessment, I will cover my experiences playing Blu-ray rips, as this is what my Popcorn Hour A-110 was used for, for around 99% of the time.

Initial impressions

Removing the device from the packaging, I noticed a rattling noise. I opened the case and tilted the player. It appears there is a screw or something loose inside the front part of the machine that houses the LCD display — not accessible without completely dismantling the machine. I decided to check everything was working, and as it appeared to be, I left the screw “as-is”.

The player appears to have been well made — the power button had a smooth action, and the case is a nice design, all black and around the same width and depth as a normal Blu-ray player, albeit somewhat taller.
It should fit in well with other consumer electronics devices (unlike the A-110!).

Powering up the player, it booted quickly, and the menus were responsive.

The LCD display on the front of the device leaves a lot to be desired I have not tried adjusting the contrast, but the screen is barely visible when viewed at any kind of angle, and the text is pretty much unreadable from 2 metres away, even when viewed “dead on”.
I haven’t decided where to put the player yet. “Under the TV” seems to be a logical place, but not if you want to read the display.

I used the infra-red kit exclusively during initial testing. The IR receiver works very well with my Harmony remote — I was able to point the remote in almost any direction and get a response from the player, which contrasts with the poor, highly directional IR receiver in the A-100.

All my video and audio connections are HDMI only.

Firmware

I was slightly dreading the firmware upgrade experience, as there have been reports of problems, but my C-200 came with the latest firmware already installed (4th September at time of writing). I tested over-writing the installed firmware with the same build, which worked fine. I then installed a 3.5″ SATA drive, formatted it, and set up the NMT applications. All the applications were switched off during initial testing.

I had also read of problems streaming over network connections when using gigabit networking, so I connected the player to a 10/100 port on my router. All other devices are connected using a gigabit switch.

Because of the reported problems with networking, my initial tests were done with a USB drive.

Blu-ray playback

My first tests were with the following untouched Blu-ray rips stored on a USB drive directly attached to the C-200:

• Blue Planet (1990)
• Cars (2006)

I chose Cars because it has BD-J, fairly complex menus and quite a high bitrate, including PCM audio.

Cars: All the pre-movie trailers played (with audio), then the menus appeared, but there was no audio in the menu.
On later testing, I found that setting the audio output of the C-200 to “PCM” gets the menu audio working, but that is not a fix, as if you are connecting the player to an A/V amp, you will want the audio output of Dolby Digital/TrueHD and DTS/HD/HD-MA to be “RAW” so you can bitstream the HD audio codecs.

There are some discs that do play audio correctly in the menu — I believe they are using Dolby Digital audio in the menus, so it may have something to do with either the codec or how the audio is implemented during BD authoring. This is a bug that needs fixing.

Using another disc, I tried PIP video (“BonusView”) and found the audio did not work at all, even when switching to PCM output from the C-200 and cycling through all the audio tracks. This looks like another bug that needs fixing.

Blue Planet is a much simpler disc, but I was able to test the Pop-up menu functionality (using the TITLE button on the remote), and successfully switched audio tracks.

DTS-HD MA, TrueHD and PCM audio all seem to be functioning correctly, bitstreaming to the amp and lighting up the appropriate indicators.

Trick play is particularly impressive, with fast-forwarding up to 32x. This works better than any standalone player I’ve used. I also tested seamless branching, which was…seamless.

Unfortunately, auto frame rate is not implemented in the current firmware, so I set the output to 24p (for most movies, this should be 23.976fps, but this was not an option). It was a pain to have to switch to 25fps for some discs.

When using the INFO button, there was some flickering of the Info details at times, particularly during menus.

BD-J is nice and quick — much more pleasant than using the first and second generation standalone Blu-ray players.

I have not yet tried BD Live.

I was surprised how well BD playback worked, apart from the problems with the menu and PIP audio, it appears to be working very well.

LAN streaming

As mentioned above, I connected the C-200 to a 10/100 port on my router, as opposed to a port on my gigabit switch to attempt to avoid the problems reported concerning gigabit connections.

I tested playback from the following:

• Buffalo LinkStation Live (Samba)
• uNRAID server 1 (Samba, llink)
• unRAID server 2 (Samba)

To my surprise, BD playback over the LAN worked perfectly! I have only been using the player for 2 hours, so this is not a definitive test, but I threw some very difficult discs at the C-200 and they all worked prefectly, with no glitches, dropouts or stuttering.

I have a collection of around 500 Blu-ray discs on my two unRAID servers, and the one disc with the highest bitrate is “The Beyoncé Experience Live”. This has very high sustained bitrates, and very high peaks. It’s one of the few discs I can’t play over NFS to my A-110 (and you can really forget about Samba on the A-110), it required an http server (llink) to stream successfully.

The screenshot below shows some of the peak bitrates streamed from the server. Most of the time, the bitrate is around 30 to 40 megabits, but occasionally it goes well over 50 megabits.

The Beyonce Experience Blu-ray bitrate peaks

Surprisingly, playing this disc over Samba from an unRAID server worked perfectly. Not a dropped frame, no stutter. I also played it over http with similar results.

My guess is that I may have been lucky with the combination of network switches or the server type, or one or more of the NICS. Either that or problems people have been reporting may have been related to incorrect frame rate settings — although I believe one reporter had tested several frame rates.
Either way, so far, Blu-ray playback is working over the LAN. I will give it a real test later today when I will stream an entire film over the LAN.

This concludes my initial testing of the C-200. There should be more to follow as I spend more time with the player. So far, I’m impressed.

UPDATE: I’ve now played quite a few more discs. There are problems with secondary audio on many discs, mainly during special features — audio commentary, seamless branching features that drop in a different soundtrack, such as Deja Vu, and just about every Disney Blu-ray. There’s no point listing the titles affected, as there are a lot.
I think it would make sense to wait until Syabas release their first “proper” firmware release before reporting on these problems, as they clearly know about them.

The player is sometimes unstable, requiring reboots after playing around with different Blu-ray titles. However, overall I’m surprised at how much works in the “non-proper” firmware compared to what’s broken. The big test will be seeing if it survives playing an entire movie without incident, which will come later this evening!

UPDATE 2: Last night, I played the Ratatouille Blu-ray in “Cine-Explore” mode. This is quite a good test, I believe, as it has BD-J menus, and in Cine-Explore mode it seamlessly branches the movie and also branches off interactively to other content in 720×480, then back to 1080p over and over again. It has an alternate audio track and overlays huge still images during playback. To get the commentary track working, I had to switch audio output to PCM, but once that was done, all the features worked fine. The biggest problem with Blu-ray playback right now is audio handling. Once they have that fixed, and the stability sorted, it should be a really nice BD player.