Having used the PPV for well over a month and using it on a day-in-day-out basis, it is clear that it has a variety of problems & quirks but as others in this forum have expressed, I am hopeful that most can be fixed with a firmware patch of some type.

For now, the most annoying issue is the 16:9 viewing issue.  The noisy fan is not so much a problem for me as I have my PPV in an equipment closet but I certainly agree with those that have objected to the fan noise.

My Sony HD HandyCam produces excellent video (.MTS format) but despite the press on the PPV, I CANNOT view a single .MTS formatted video if just copied straight from the camera to the PPV.  I have diligently experimented with all of the PPV settings but to no avail.

In addition to the volume of new video I'm generating (new grandbaby), I have tons of old video (mostly MP4 from a FlipVideo Camera).  Again, despite the press, the PPV does not stream out-of-the-camera MP4s very well...low quality after PPV gets its hands on it.

On the other hand, the PPV does provide a platform to share files with others and ourselves.  I have found that my family (within our immediate household and remote members) enjoys and watches photos/videos more if the media is in a easy-to-access and view environment.  Pogoplug pretty well provides a usable environment...most of the time...except when the Pogoplugs hard drives go M.I.A.

So rather than waiting on the perfect PPV, I opted to pursue the following as a means of working around the current PPV problems:

1.  All native transcoding capability within the Pogoplug is turned off.  Now having said that I'm still fairly confident that some is still is going on because I see videos that were "small" one day, appear the correct size later.  See Handbrake comment below.  But this might also be related to the viewing size issue that PPV has...I just don't know.

2.  All videos are transcoded using Handbrake/DropFolders using a format/resolution that I find to be pleasing to the eye and practical for viewing on most mobile devices and PCs.  This format/resolution came after hours and hours of trial & error.

The transcoding format required some tedious attention to Handbrakes CLI (Command Line Interface) parameters to finally achieve the desired result.

I have focused mostly on the Handbrake parameters that affect video.  I don't have problems with sound.

At present, I have developed three sets of Handbrake parameters that I use...selecting the one that fits my need at the moment:

640x480  (3x4 viewing size)

960x540 (custom anamorphic)

960 wide (loose anamorphic)

All are optimized for web-based viewing.

Please note that I do not claim to be a Handbrake parameters expert but my trial and error process has gotten me close to what I want.

3.  All transcoded videos are copied to the root level of the PPV as Pogoplug Drive seems to "lose" the target folder if you go too deeply into the PPV directory hierarchy during copy operations.

4.  Once transcoded videos are at the PPV root level, I use PPV's native MOVE function to move the files to the desired directory on the PPV.

NOTE:  As a good practice, you should always maintain a pristine "original" of your videos and always work with a COPY.  I would NEVER place the only copy of a video on any Pogoplug device.  Yes, I have seen it eat files with no possibility of retrieval.

Yes, I know PPV is supposed to stream without so much effort but for now it doesn't seem to do so.

The combination of Handbrake and DropFolders permits a high degree of automation of the normally manual transcoding process of Handbrake itself.  You basically "copy a copy" the the video files you want to transcode into a specified directory and DropFolders detects the presents of the files and begins the transcoding process.  When it's done, just copy the transcoded files to the PPV.  The transcoded videos are optimized for web viewing so they load very quickly and the video starts to play very quickly.

As I have multiple PC/Macs with Handbrake/DropFolders, I can batch up several videos at a time and can make a real dent in my inventory of home videos.

I have verified using Windows Explorer, Windows Media Player, QuickTime Pro, etc., that the Handbrake/DropFolders-produced videos are the correct resolution since I cannot always depend upon PPV to correctly display those (or any other) videos.  I have also downloaded those same videos from the PPV back to a PC and they are correctly formatted and sized.  So the culprit in the viewing issue must be the PPV.

I have also verified those same videos are perfectly viewable on our family's iPhones and my own iPad (Gen 1).  They all play through cellular Internet too but best via wi-fi as might be expected.

So that's my "recipe" for getting around some of the PPV problems.  My goal was to make use of the platform even though PPV has some major "growing" up to do.

If you have suggestions about my process, I'd love to hear them.  Thanks.