AC Ryan ACR-73100 PlayOn!Hd - rubbis!

[Deadlight]

I just posted this on their site;


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Post I wasted by money on the Playon!Hd I fear
Good ideas, awful design, terrible support.

I really hoped, 18 months ago, that the POHD would be an 'all-in-one' solution for everything.

My fears were first raised on day 1, when I first set it up. The remote contr
ol is an awful piece of design - buttons are all over the place, any industry standard for button design or layout quickly discarded, it seems. The buttons shown in the on-screen setup, on the remote control, and in the accompaning manual DID NOT MATCH UP, meaning I had to setup the thing 'blind'.

At this point I thought (ha!) that a firmware release will be releasewd these little 'problems' - and it did, but in fixing one problem it did, but a lot of the problemes, it didn't. New errors would come with every new release, every FEW MONTHS.

But would AC Ryan solve the 'problems' before anything else? Oh no, they'll churning out a new product every quarter (or so) - claiming tha the ne product would do everything the PVR73100 did, and more! (I wonder if the owners of these other products can share the same stories as mine!) I'm sure the PVR73100 is now at the bottom of the 'proplems to fix' list.

So now, 18 months later, my media center is nothing but. The UI is slow, inconsistent and doesn't do as it's meant tto. It's certaintly isn't something my family can use, I do everything for my family - even play a movie. So ,I'm looking for a new media centre. Again.

Unhapply customer.

[tfboy]

I bought the Play On Mini HD 2, mainly for my old man. I loved the ability to be able to stream stuff off my NAS (or rather his NAS) server.

But it's far more a geeky toy with bugs and workarounds required. I wouldn't mind too much, but it's clearly not ready for consumption by the masses.

It's a shame in the way: the GUI looks nice but is totally illogical. I guess I might have the v2.0 of the GUI, and there are things that beggar belief: there's a "movies" shortcut on the home page. Great I thought, I can add shortcuts to that top-level folder to quickly access my various shares. But no, you can't. There are workarounds involving modified config files, but you shoudn't have to do this - it should work out of the box.

When I bought mine, I was hopeful that it was a product under heavy development and that there's a mine full of really valuable feedback from actual users. But the firmware releases seem to have dried up and I'm still left with a box that whilst, when it works, works great, it's a major effort to get there.

So I echo your sentiments, and IMO, it's not worth an upgrade from v1 to v2 of the hardware. It's a shame, the HW platform is great, it's quiet (fanless) and could be a killer product that just works better than XBoxes or PS3s for media streaming (more compatibility), but it's still plagued by inexcusable firmware / software glitches

I'm on the lookout for a media player myself. I use a PS3 and the Java PS3 Media Server which works fine, but ideally, I'd like to be able to play back ISO images directly of DVDs and Blu-rays which the ACRyan offers, but don't know if I can cope with the efffort required.

[Larkspeed]

Most unusual.

I had the Playon HD with a 640 Gig Hard Drive in it.

Bought it about 6 months ago and there were a couple of niggly issues.

Updated the firmware and the most major ones went away but still left a couple of minor ones.

Another firmware update a couple of months ago got rid of the problems i had and now it works brilliantly

I rarely have any problems with it and it is used on a daily basis.

The only parts I find lacking now is the horrible remote control and the fact that the in built torrent client is unstable.

That being said we have a Logitech Harmony 895 remote so we don't actually use the original one