Popcorn Hour's A-110 HD media streamer / B-110 motherboard reviewed
By Darren Murph 
posted Aug 18th 2008 12:17PM
posted Aug 18th 2008 12:17PM
If you've been putting off that purchase of Popcorn Hour's evolutionary A-110 HD media streamer or all new B-110 motherboard, here's a decent compilation of facts and opinions to help you make up your mind once and for all. The cats over at DigitalReviews took the time to not only detail, test out and report back on the newest duo from the company, but it also revisited the original (and heralded) A-100 in order to give a better comparison. Overall, critics did tend to prefer the A-110 over its predecessor, but the minor list of changes made it a hard sell for folks teetering on upgrading. The B-110 was seen as an even tougher sell, with only the hardcore DIY crowd likely to even find it worth investigating. Nevertheless, we won't spoil the rest for you -- head on down to have a look for yourself.[Thanks, Anton]
This review is pointless without trying out some of the new bitstreaming capabilities.
My big question is does the A-110 support Vorbis audio in *.mkv files? Some anime fansubbers use MKVs with vorbis audio, but currently to play them with the A-100, you have to convert the vorbis audio to mp3. The makers say a future firmware upgrade will resolve this for the A-100, but I wonder about the newer ones.
Good review , but i question a review of someone who is using a non DTS Onkyo receiver .. i mean wow .. my oldest receiver i haven't used in years did DTS
Oh well : )
I guess i will stick with my A-100 for now because even if it doesnt pass through DTS-MA or DOLBY HD on Backed up blurays it still down converts it and sounds great
I would like to know how people are wrapping these HD audio codecs; does MKV support them?
I would get this in a second if I knew there was a way to rip my HD-DVDs, demux and remux into a different container that the A-110 could handle without re-encoding the audio or video at all during the process since I have a reciever that can decode the HD audio codecs. I'm just not sure if this is possible yet.