In the end, I decided on the Xtreamer because of its promise that it will have seamless operation with the eTrayz NAS which comes from the same manufacturer.
First impressions, the eTrayz is not for the faint of heart, not easy to set up, am lucky I got it up and running, but there are still quirks I need to fix, but at least its up and running. I can access the hard disk from anywhere through the internet, from my home network, I can now wirelessly stream my flac audio to my bedroom DIY audio setup through my netbook-Super Pro DAC combo. and off course wirelessly stream my videos through the Xtreamer. It streams 720p flawlessly, unfortunately stutters on 1080p, am glad I use 720p videos mostly.
The Xtreamer, is a very small machine, compared to the Popccorn Hour, its build quality is nothing to crow about. Its plasticky and light as a feather. But setting up was a breeze, upgraded to fw 2.2 before firing it up for video testing.
I like the GUI, not as cool as the previous Popcorn Hour blue, this one is red and black combo. but I liked that it can display a lot of movies on screen and if you have a jpeg file, it will show as a huge thumnail/poster. And once you select the folder, it also has a preview pane for the movie, other realtek based player, can only display 3-4 movies at one time. Its booting time is considerably faster than the old Popcorn Hour, which is a welcome feature, I think from turning it on to recognizing the eTrayz and My Book HDDs to watching is less than 30 seconds. The auto handshake between eTrayz and Xtreamer worked as promised, although you can use other network sharing options like NFS, UPnP or SAMBA, the eTrayz tab option provided the most stable streaming option. I think the makers optimized the settings for this. And since I am not a techie guy, I am happy with this, have not tried the other functions extensively, watched a couple of internet tv (works), the internet radio is pretty cool too, lots of commercial free stations.
Overall, I am happy with my new media player - NAS combo. Movies and music galore!
Some pictures:
The Xtreamer
The eTrayz with 3TB HDDs
The Home Page
Variety of ways to connect to your content, for me just the USB for external HDD and eTrayz for the NAS.
Simple AV settings page, but it gets the job done. No HD audio pass through here.
These logos show up on every settings page, highlighted red means the function is available, no highlight means not available, in this case, I have no internal hdd and no external PC network attached (I think).
Here it shows the movie's poster, not the jukebox we want, but it works. specially with the long movie listing.
Once you enter the folder, it previews the movie on a small pane. Sorry for this picture, it was moving.
