Popcorn Hour VTEN Media Player - Black

worth a go if it does what you want

I purchased this item intending it to replace my C-200 media player, which in turn had replaced an A-100. I mainly required it to play UHD material that I create both using video from a Panasonic FZ1000 camera and also slideshows created in UHD, both edited using Sony Movie Studio 13. Whilst my LG UHD TV will play this material, it is not totally comfortable with fast-moving pans and zooms, exhibiting some judder for about a second before smoothing out. My hope was that the VTEN would fare better.First impressions were that it was surprisingly small - roughly the same size as the 2TB WD Elements USB2 HDD I intended to use with it. Setup was relatively quick, including a firmware update, and I used a 16 GB SDHD card in the slot provided upon which I downloaded the NMT apps which makes the unit's connection with my LAN more convenient. The GUI was different from previous units, but familiar enough to be easily used.I feed the VTEN's HDMI output into a Pioneer receiver which handles audio via HDMI, and is set to pass through the video to the TV unchanged. In this mode the VTEN played HD (1080i 50 and 1080p 50) material excellently, both from USB and my wired LAN. It would not, however, display the menu of iso'd Blu-ray discs, which was disappointing as the C-200 will handle this easily. Upscaling to UHD 25 fps was excellent; subjectively I felt that overall video and audio output was slightly better than the C-200.The big disappointment was that the VTEN could not handle my UHD material, which is 3840X2160 25fps with a data rate of round 90 MB/s in MP4 format. I tried via the USB 2.0 HDD (powered from its own adaptor), a USB 3.0 Seagate HDD powered via USB, and a USB 3.0 memory stick - in all cases the VTEN stuttered badly and was unuseable. If I used a DIVX converter to reduce the data rate of my files to about 30 MB/s in mkv format things improved considerably but still didn't equal the TV's own efforts.Whether the VTEN would perform more acceptably with 4K/UHD in another format, I cannot say, but I do not have that option in my editing. My quick conclusion is that it gives excellent results on HD material, if you can overlook it's lack of full DVD/Blu-ray ISO support, but it cannot handle (my) UHD material adequately. I have not attempted to use the apps to access the internet as this function is not of interest to me.* UPDATEHaving now experimented for a week with my DivX converter program, I have improved the quality of its output by increasing the ridiculously low default bit rate from 5MB/s to the maximum 31 MB/s and chosen a higher output quality setting. This has resulted in the creation of MKV UHD files that are subjectively difficult to distinguish from the original MP4 ones, and typically one-third of the size. The VTen now will play these files smoothly (more so than the way the TV plays the original MP4s), not only from attached USB drives but also from drives on my (wired) LAN. This only leaves me wishing that a firmware upgrade could allow the VTen to play ISO files fully, including menus. My score must increase to 4 stars ****.

I purchased the Popcorn hour VTEN because of the positive internet reviews, the media player was intended as an upgrade to an aging Med8er MED800X3D. On paper the software and hardware specs indicated that the VTEN was the next generation media player I wanted offering 4K upscaling a faster Sigma Arm Cortex A-9 processor more memory and Gigabit ethernet. The build quality of the VTEN is good, it's a good size slightly larger than an Amazon Fire TV. The remote control unfortunately is very cheap, a media player of this quality and cost should be accompanied with a much more tactile LED backlit keypad remote. This wasn't an issue for me as I was going to use the player with a Logitech Harmony One remote but I used the supplied remote during setup. if you are considering this media player lookout for a better third party remote.Once the setup wizard has been completed navigating the menu seemed to be a unintuitive affair, sometimes you move backward with the return key other times the home button. The popup keyboard is the normal remote control driven format but I noticed the coders had not selected the right keyboard to popup. An IP Address needs a number pad not a qwerty keyboard, simple stuff really but it is inconvenient and shows a lack of attention to detail.The VTEN has Cloud Media NMJ installed, which again on paper promised the user experience I wanted. This software is created from a suite of opensource packages with Fanart and synopses scraped from TV DB and IMBD as many other media jukeboxes do (Med8er, Kodi and Plex). The NMJ software had a 30% hit rate determining the correct movie/show from the TV DB APIs. Kodi, Plex Media and Med8ers hit rate was above 90% if not higher from the same data source. I tried changing the folder structure adding the year to the filenames but it still failed to scrape the correct show details. Correcting the failed scrapes is very time consuming due to the poor menu layout. To make up for this deficiency there is a Windows based NMJ toolkit to drill down into the DB to correct the issues and this seemed to work. My media library is stored on a Netgear Readynas delivering read/writes around 40MB/s and internet download speeds about 50mbps but the scarper performance can only be described as poor. Its doing some nice things like pulling media info from the files so it can be displayed within the jukebox but even though its doing this it takes an extraordinary amount of time. Kodi does this on the fly, Plex also examines each file as it processes but takes much less time. A sizable jukebox could take days to process for reasons that are not clear to me.The Jukebox is also a little light on content, TVDB is able to provide a synopsis and picture for each episode of a TV series for example. The NMJ in the VTEN was unable scrape and display this, also the very minimum you would also expect a movie scraper to add is a link to the movie trailer. These are free on youtube and is available on med8er and plex media.High end media players like the VTEN capable of 4K should as a minimum be able to cope with HD sound. Why have 4k picture without HD sound? The VTEN is good with DTS MA but is still lacking with Dolby True HD. I carried out a simple test with an MKV container with 2 audio tracks, the VTEN was unable to switch from True HD to Dolby Digital and back. The sound dropped out completely. I repeated the same test on the Mede8er, it had no issues. I use an Onkyo TX-SR5608 AV receiver configured with 7.1 speaker setup as it accurately reports the codec being used. The HD sound capabilities of the media player are currently limited, I suspect that firmware releases will eventually fix this issue but it appears that the player has been released before production ready and Cloud Media have underestimated the competition.I have returned the Media Player as its still in beta and not production ready. Running plex media on the player was a lot better experiance that the NMJ but I still had issues with NFS and HD sound which indicates its a problem with the Sigma code rather than the hardware or Popcorn coding. As there are question marks over the HD sound and Jukebox performance I would purchase a cheap Android 5 Kodi media player and forgo HD sounds and save yourself £70. If you required a good Jukebox and HD sound buy something else, this product is not for you.