Quick PopcornHour Firmware Tip

When upgrading the firmware on your PopcornHour A-100 Network Media Tank, you might end up with a hung machine before any operations take place. You’ll know this has happened because your TV screen will go black as soon as you start the process. If this happens to you, there’s a simple solution…remove your custom theme. You don’t have to delete it, just renaming the theme folder form _theme_ to theme and rebooting the A-100 is enough to get you in the firmware updating business. Once you’ve updated, you can safely re-apply your theme and be back in business.

Linux, SwissCenter, and the PopcornHour A-100

So I’ve been using the awesome SwissCenter media streaming server with my PopcornHour A-100 for a while now. Over the weekend, Windows XP decided it didn’t want to run on my file server any longer (yeah, I know… 🙂 ). In it’s place I installed Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron”. After migrating my SwissCenter settings over to the new Linux install, everything worked, except SwissCenter no longer showed up on the Sources page on the A-100.

After a few hours of searching and a post to the SwissCenter forums, I got a reply from the SwissCenter team pointing me at the broadcast.pl script that comes with SwissCenter. Out of the box, things were promising, as I could see the A-100 talking to the broadcast script, but still no link on the sources screen. After another few hours of testing (and a good nights’ sleep), I found the problem.

You can read more about the script and my fix, and download my broadcast script package over at the SwissCenter UPnP/SSDP Broadcast Script for PopcornHour A-100 page. If you have any questions, please leave a comment either on this post, or on the download page.