The Xtreamer + eTrayz Combo!!!

I been a Popcorn Hour user for the past two years and am very happy with it. But two years in this hobby of ours is considered light years already. Time to move on, saw the eTrayz NAS that was selling very competitively and decided to take the plunge. Pairing it with the right media player, I was deciding on Xtreamer or the new Popcorn Hour A-200.

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.

My Media Players!

I am now enjoying my media room! And my wife is both happy and unhappy, she is happy because I always want to be at home, unhappy because I could lock myself inside the room for hours just being a couch potato (my wife can only withstand 2 movies in a row). Anyway, I have been revisiting my old DVD collection and boy-oh-boy does my collection look much better now when I play them on my Pioneer DV-600AV, its an upscaling DVD player, which turns your old DVD (480 line resolution) to 720p or even 1080p resolution making it very close to HiDef, it does it by upconverting the dvd standard image thru interpolation. Its a very nice player.

But of course, the purpose of me wanting my very own media room is to take the HiDef plunge and I willingly did so by choosing HDDVD, as I mentioned a few articles back, its a dead format but its damn cheap right now, so Bluray has to wait. My player is the Toshiba HD-A3 player which I got from a Pinoy DVD member for a song! And I am very happy with it, bought a lot of HDDVDs from Amazon (its always on sale) and sometimes from the pre-owned market here in the Philippines, would you believe I got the KingKong HDDVD for only 300 pesos! That's what you call a bargain, and the PQ (picture quality) and SQ (sound quality) is just awesome compared to your standard definition DVDs (upscaled or not).


And to round up my stable of players is the Popcorn Hour A-100 Network Media Tank. Its categorized as a media player, but its basically a computer hardware that plays all kinds of video and audio files straight from a hard disk, or even a usb flash drive. Its an awesome piece of equipment. For its small form factor, you could never thought that it can do all the stuff it was advertised to do. One of the "in" thing now is to turn all HiDef materials into HiDef files and they put all this content into an AV container, and the most popular today is the Matroska container or .mkv behind the AV files they are containing. And these HiDef .mkv files plays flawlessly from my Popcorn Hour A-100. The PQ is excellent, the SQ is still the same as old DVDs with its Dolby and DTS sound, but in general its acceptable.

The funny thing is out of the three media players I have, the Popcorn Hour A-100 is the most often use device in my media room right now. You can get it locally from http://myhdworld.mutiply.com/ you can talk to the guys there and they are very accomodating and their service is fantastic! I will try to post some screen shots as my next article to show you the difference in Picture Quality among the different media players I have. As a fellow Pinoy DVD member says "I am now in HD Nirvana!"

My Media Room!

After our house renovation ended a couple of months ago. My guess is my wife's centerpiece would definitely hands down the kitchen and our master's bedroom, but for me, it's definitely our MEDIA ROOM! It really took some convincing for my wife to agree in giving me a standalone room just for my toys. After a compromise (room can be used as a guest room), I got my own MEDIA ROOM!

It will take a long piece to write and tell the story about the room's evolution, so I decided to just post pictures upon pictures of it, as they say "a picture's worth a thousand words".

The Renovation

The room still needing a coat of paint! Old stuff still cluttered all over.

The old parquet floor also got a much needed rehab!

The Furnitures

The Molave Daybed, handcrafted from Nueva Vizcaya.
The old Tangile bookshelves from my parents, repainted to be used as a dvd rack!

The La-Z-Boy, no Media Room should be missing one!

Sabre TV Rack, got this pre-owned! looks like new.

Sigma Rack, for my AV eqipments!

The EQUIPMENTS

The centerpiece of the room, my new Toshiba 37" LCD TV!

The speakers, Wharfedale Atlantics, also pre-owned, bought it for a song,
not seen in the picture are two surround speakers to complete the set.

Toshiba HD DVD Player HD-A3, although the loser in the hidef contest,
I got it cheap, HD DVD are cheap too!

Pioneer DV-600AV, an uspcaling DVD player, upscales
standard 480i DVDs to hidef resolution of
720p/1080i/1080p through interpolation.

Popcorn Hour A-100 Network Media Tank, a harddisk based media player,
plays all sorts of video & audio files including MKVs (for hidef content!).
All I need now are hidef MKVs!

Hyundai Premiere 98+ Karaoke Player, for those singing moments!

Onkyo TX-604G, a 7.1 HDMI based AV receiver, the power plant
that make everything works!

These two US Audio subwoofers, an 8 incher and a 12 incher provides
the oomph factor in movies and music! there are better ones,
but these babies will do fine..... for now!

The Nintendo Wii, need I say more.

No Media Room is complete without these networking stuff!

The universal remote to control them all! The Logitech Harmony One!

The Almost Finished Product (90%)

Front part of the Media Room.

The viewing area, back part of the Media Room.

The DVD cabinet, now full! Look at Stitch.

The customary movie posters for effect.

Well, that is all for now, I hope some of you can find inspiration from this place, I know some of you might have bigger or better place, then good for you. The most important thing is to enjoy all the hardwork and money put into projects like this. I know I do! Ciao!