Electronista is reporting today that Syabas, the company behind the Popcorn Hour media hub, will be showing off the newly dubbed Popbox at the upcoming CES event, a media hub that should surpass the Popcorn Hour in every way thanks to a newly finished user interface overhaul.
The new interface includes “infopops” which show off the weather, Twitter feeds, and other data. The interface also includes a cover-flow-esque visual thumbnails selection for videos, music and other data, as well as universal search.
More notably, the interface can handle Flash, Java and QT meaning Netflix is now available. Also available is Hulu, CBS and ABC content, which can now include the in-video ads required for playback. Facebook, Twitter, Shoutcast MP3, Revision3 and other Popcorn Hour content will rollover to the new box.
For video, full 1080p at 100Mbps is now supported, along with the standard MPEG formats, H.264, VC-1, WMV, MKV, XviD and other containers. The player can also support most subtitle files, including Microsoft’s proprietary one. For streaming, the Popbox can recognize iTunes via Bonjour, and DLNA and UPnP sources.
The device has no built-in storage but has USB ports and an SD slot.
The Popbox should be available in March and will cost just $130 USD.
Pics via Electronista:
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Microsoft has half-learned a very important lesson from users of the Windows Vista operating systems; enough with the damn User Account Control prompts already! While Windows 7 still has some UAC prompts on by default (surely can be disabled like with Vista) they will be cut down by about 29 percent, which still leaves a whole lot of annoying prompts.
“From our beta and internal testing, we expect a 29% decrease in UAC prompts compared to Windows Vista,” Paul Cooke, Microsoft Corp.’s director of Windows 7 client enterprise security, said last week. The UAC prompts are intended to prevent malware infections by asking the user to confirm program executions before they can take place.
Unfortunately, with Windows Vista even the most patient user was suffering from “click fatigue,” according to an internal Microsoft study. While scaling back is always welcome, it’s probably fair to say that users who can, will disable the prompts altogether for the good of their mental health.
In other Windows 7 news, Windows Media Player 12 ships with the Release Candidate of the operating system, and will include codec support for many popular formats out of the box. Users reportedly won’t have to install an XviD codec to decode XviD video, and won’t need a separate splitter installed for MP4 content. Apple QuickTime files also reportedly play with the software without any additional installations.
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An Israeli company, High Definition Israel or HDi, has introduced couple of interesting Blu-ray players. In addition to playing Blu-ray movies, the players support MKV and DivX files as well as BitTorrent downloads.
HDi has two product families, Dune HD Center and Dune BD Prime, both with four models for different network connection and external hard drive setups. With Dune BD Prime you can choose between the base model, one with WiFi 802.11n, one with Gigabit ethernet, and one with two eSATA ports. In addition to the same upgrade options the more expensive Dune HD Centers feature a rack for internal SATA drives as well.
All of the players have BD Live support, 1GB of internal flash memory, BD/DVD/CD playback, three USB ports for external USB drives, support for NFS and Samba file sharing as well as support for IPTV and Internet radio.
HDi’s players have also extensive file support, including support for AVI, MKV (Matroska), M2TS, TS, MOV, MP4 and WMV files.
MPEG2, MPEG4, DivX, XVID, WMV9, VC1 and H.264/AVC video codecs and AC3 (Dolby Digital), EAC3 (Dolby Digital+), DTS, MPEG 1/2/3, AAC, LPCM, WMA, WMAPro, Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Master Audio audio codecs are supported as well. Dune BD Prime players are able to display both SSA/ASS and SRT subtitles.
The players feature HDMI and component outputs that are able to pass 1080p resolution video. Audio outputs include digital Toslink and RCA and analogue 7.1 RCA.
To make it even more impressive, all the HDi Blu-ray players also feature a BitTorrent client and a Gecko-based web browser.
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