I thought a long time about ordering my Popcornhour. I heard/read of it about a year ago. First it was only available in the US but since some months it is possible to get it through a reseller in Austria. So i decided about six weeks ago to give it a try. The Austrian reseller took preorders because he was constantly out of stock. Although the web site said that it would be available at the end of December my box came about a week before Christmas.

The days before and after Christmas were busy days so I had not really spent much time using my Popcornhour. I hooked it up to my TV the day I got it. The first thing I did was to connect the Popcornhour to my network and to the samba share of my media server and my VDR. This was very easy by using the on screen menu and the delivered remote control (which is a high quality remote control).

By doing that I already was able to do all I wanted to to with my Popcornhour:

• watching any kind of video file (regardless of their codec) from my media server
• opening recordings from my VDR over the network (it is able to read them!)

At this point I was satisfied with the Popcornhour. I was satisfied but not excited. Everything worked as expected – this was really a consumer device, no geeky gadget. But then I found out about other features … streaming video – and I was excited!

There are a lot of web services preinstalled on the device that allow you to connect to different sites providing video, audio and/or picture content. For example youtube, flickr, picasa, revision3, blip, Apple movie trailers … This means I am able to zap through hundreds of video/audio podcasts like Diggnation, Ask A Ninja or Epic Fu and to watch them on my television. Wow! There never has been more content available on my fingertips.

I am looking forward to get services on my Popcornhour like hulu or netflix by just adding more web services!

Btw you can see some pictures of the unboxing here.