I own a few... Options

[neverlift]

...media players, the PS3 as well as AppleTV (fully hacked since day one) but the player I exclusively use now is the WDTV! I even own the Sony BDP-550 Blu-Ray player and have used it once since I bought it at Xmas. The PS3 handles this and that BUT doesnt handle this and that...real confusing sometimes. The AppleTV is just pure shit minus the fact it has the wifi built in which is great...but thats it! The only way to get the AppleTV to play what you want is to hack it and even then I have found sometimes it just re sets itself. Then I have to re-do the whole hack again, very unstable to say the least. So with that said I will just stick with my WDTV and let all the others have a long deserved rest.

I would like to hear from people that own the popcorn hour and could possible give us the low down on how that unit compares to the WDTV, we know it is wifi ready but what else...?

[leezul]

My friend has the popcorn hour and from what i saw of it...Personally it seemed like very similar capabilities. Nothing too impressive to pay for the price point that it's at. 1080p seems to look about the same as the wdtv plays but maybe using it longer that I did ( just watched several movies couple times on it) other people might know better...

I also used an xbox 360 for my previous media player, but man that shit is loud as hell and trying to plug an external with a format that isn't fat32 was a pain since I had to format my external partially ntfs and hfs+. Coming from a windows user had an issue accomplishing that. No subtitle support unless its hardcoded. Only wmv 1080p format .....pain in the ass if you ask me but great for gaming......

How was the ps3 on media support? full bluray capabilities?

[neverlift]

Hi leezul,

Welcome to the forum...Thanks for the info on the popcorn hour. The PS3 was a crap shoot as far as what it plays. It couldnt play mkv's only if you re encoded them into a vob. Even then if it was a 1080p rip it wouldnt play, so you needed to stick with the 720 rips. Although as far as viewing your family vacation pictures it worked really well. I find with the WDTV viewing pictures is painfully slow.

The bluray capabilities are there which is nice, so you get a gaming console and a bluray movie player all in one. But as well as the XBOX the noise levels of the PS3 suck.

[greenhorn]

the ps3 is pretty much for games now, i used to stream xvids off it but not anymore. not a lot of extensions played on the ps3 unless you want to re-encode something. if i read correctly the popcorn hour dosent have internal wifi, you need to use a usb wifi adapter. so with that the wdtv is way more of a bargain at 99 bucks usd than the 250 usd for the popcorn hour. ssh or ftp'ing to your box is slow and painful, anyhow at least with my n network it just doesnt seem worth all the hassles. i just simply unplug my external hdd load a hd movie approx. 9gb in under 6 minutes. im happy with that.

[Organized]

what I use for media playback before the wdtv was a mac mini, with Plex app
which basically is a XBMC port. I used a Logitech remote and don't even need a
keyboard/mouse for the mac mini.
Got the wdtv for the bedroom and have been loving it so far.

[Rev Drew]

I built a media center PC back in 2004 I think it was.
the was good, then I got an xbox and modded the hell out of it, that was better.
then we got an xbox 360, that is awesome to, it can be tricked to play WMV-HD movies easily enough, so i downloaded a lot of them and burnt to dual layer dvd's.
now I have the WD TV player and the video quality is excellent, but the audio is lagging, it cuts out, occasional pops in it, etc....

I guess there is no substitute for the real thing, however I choose not to spend that much cash on this stuff so I put up with it's idiosyncrasies, all of these things have limitations and downfalls...

overall I am happy with it, I couldn't afford to buy the hardware let alone all the movies.