I talked about the Popcorn Hour a few posts back and how it is a very versatile media player with support for many codec’s, but the biggest problem with the system is the user interface, basically the out of box experience is pretty poor and resembles a badly done Windows file explorer.
Luckily there are many ways to improve this and improve it they certainly do, I have put together a short video showing the UI out of the box and what can be done with a little bit of work and I am sure you will agree the results can be quite stunning.
(Unfortunately the video camera is a bit lame and goes out of focus at the start and has a rather annoying clicking sound.)
To improve the UI, I used a program called YAMJ (Yet Another Movie Jukebox) and Damian over at Media Smart Server has posted a great guide on setting up YAMJ on a Popcorn Hour, you can find it here.
It seems complicated to do but once you have spent the time setting it up, it really is easy to manage and add extra content.
All the media is stored on a Windows Home Server and the share is set up on the Popcorn Hour using NFS, this seemed to produce the best streaming experience over the network, again Damian has an excellent guide for setting up NFS Streaming on a Windows Home Server, you can find that guide here.
Apologies again for the video quality, I am saving the pennies for a decent HD Camera.
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