People who know me, know I love my mediaplayer, so much even that barely watch regular TV nowadays. I’ve been using Popcorn Hour mediaplayers for a long time now and even though they’re not the cheapest ones, I’ve always been very happy with them. I’ve even recommended them to many people who bought them as well.

Yesterday however, one of my friends was having an issue with his Popcorn Hour A-200 mediaplayer. I suggested he should check for and install the latest firmware version (August 10, 2012). Because I hadn’t updated mine in quite some time either I decided to upgrade it together with him even though I did not really have a need to upgrade mine.

After the update, my PCH-A200 couldn’t connect to my samba(SMB) / CIFS network shares on Windows Server 2012 anymore. For the shares that worked previously I got an error stating:
“Unable to resolve the host name. Press [return] key to return to the previous screen”.
The network itself was working since I was able to use internet radio.

As it turns out, many problems have been introduced with the latest firmware versions. I did try using NFS shares, but even though I could browse them I was not able to playback videos.

Ultimately I decided to go back two firmware versions. After installing the firmware of May 25th, 2011 everything was working fine again.

Conclusion: Newer versions are not always better !!!!