Popbox V8

Popcorn Hour media centres are justifiably successful but are also often very expensive. Syabas, the the company behind the PCH brand, is now also offering a much more affordable media streamer, the Popbox V8. It includes a certain number of PCH features such as the built-in jukebox and the well designed applications market. Does this make the V8 a real hit in the mid-range media centre segment, or rather a damp squib? Answers below!

High quality casing and remote

Entirely in aluminium, the Popbox V8 casing is very compact. There's no fan and the centre therefore runs in silence - low energy consumption (5.3 Watts) means it doesn't heat up much. It is however a shame that you can't turn it off entirely. It continues to draw down 3.6 Watts in standby and there's no switch to turn the power off.

The infrared remote made a good impression. All that's missing in comparison to the Popcorn Hour remotes are the number buttons. It nevertheless has the same high-end finish with excellent quality plastic, rubber buttons and the very practical backlighting.

A well-designed but incomplete interface

The interface is well designed and navigation through the files nice and fast. Two display methods are available: list or thumbnail. The list display simply lists the names of folders and files in tree format.


The thumbnail display allows you to view film and series posters (see inset) as well as album covers. With album covers, what you get is the external image. Covers integrated in audio files are only displayed for a couple of seconds when the track changes. There's no audio playback interface however and the folder images are static during track playback.


Unfortunately, there's no mosaic mode and this is unlikely to change if Syabas is to be believed. Sourcing a particular photo is therefore problematic and you can't display a wall of film posters or audio album covers either. Coming back to the photo display again, we were amazed to find that there was no zoom or rotation feature.

Decent media compatibility

HD video playback isn't a problem, even when encoding speeds are high. The number of formats supported stands up to what you get on the competition, but you don't get access to chapters during playback of DVD backups. There are no issues with audio track playback however and you can synch up audio and video tracks which is always practical when required.

DTS and Dolby Digital tracks can be decoded (stereo downmix) or sent to an external audio amp in bitstream. The same goes for DTS HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD.


Note also that 3D video is supported (side-by-side only) but that MVC codecs of 3D Blu-rays aren't. Video throughput (24p) is automatically detected and adjusted according to the videos played.

Rich connectivity

There are plenty of audio / video outs: HDMI, component, composite and optical. Two USB 2.0 ports allow you to link up external peripherals. There's an Ethernet 100 Mbps network connection and you can stream (whatever network sharing you like or UPnP) no problem, even high throughput video.