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KitGuru has reviewed many of the AC Ryan Playon! products in the past and we have always been impressed with their pricing, user interface and build quality. Today we are looking at their new ‘full size' Playon! HD 2 which contains a 1TB hard drive and delivers gigabit lan connectivity.
The Playon! HD2 is the next generation network media player from AC Ryan and features the new RealTek processor which is 25% faster than the last generation unit (now 500mhz). Not only is there Gigabit lan support, but AC Ryan have included a USB 3.0 slave port for fast connection to and from a PC.
With new Social Media functionality is this the greatest and best equipped media player on the market today?
Overview (full specifications available here):
- More format support
Supports BD-ISO and DVD IFO/ISO
- Engage Social Media
Connect with your friends
- Gigabit Wired Networking
For Performance Streaming
- Unique User Interface
Playon! GUI2.0
- Smart Content Management
Autofile Indexing
- USB 3.0 Connection
Faster PCTransfer Speeds
- EZ Drive Slot
Easy Hard Drive Insertion
Excellent range of products these guys put out every year.
I love the piano finish. Interesting idea to add USB 3.0, cant see myself using that much as i would leave this in a network position all the time, not next to a PC? more next to a TV. Dissappointing about the gigabit lan performance, I was expecting much faster times to internal drive over network.
Looks great. The pricing is hard to beat. USB 3.0 option would actually be useful for me to transfer a lot of content over, as I dont really have a good home network.
I wish one of these could act as a 24/7 nas with good speeds. no one makes one yet. 🙁 means you could download on the PC< move it to the NAS connected to the TV and watch the stuff later. they are all far too slow.
They do the styling well, reminds me of my pioneer limited edition amplifier with piano finish. I think I spent more time polishing it than using it.
korn, why not just copy them to a NAS, and then stream them to the media player later?
I keep meaning to buy a media player like this, just havent gotten around to it. ive a ton of spare HDs. the bare one would make more sense for me.
AC Ryan told us “The processor is unable to handle large data packets via the same Gigabit Ethernet port. For a standalone NAS system, the chipset used is better meant to handle data transfer, and Gigabit Ethernet improves this by providing a larger bandwidth.
This is not an uncommon problem with media players, with the current Sigma processor also handling high bitrate streaming via their Gigabit port, but data transfer is relatively the same as our players on Realtek. At the moment Realtek is tweaking the data packets configuration to improve in this area, but it will not achieve the intended data transfer rates due to the processor limitation.”