Good afternoon,

The first review for the new Playon!DVRHD has been published by Hardware.info in the Netherlands.
It was given a methodical testing and received the Bronze award!
Here is a summary of the review below:


“Large amount of functionality for a satisfactory price”

“Support for video files includes just about everything fans could want, from MPEG1/2/4 to H.264 and VC-1, from MKV to WMV and MOV files. Very pleasant is the extensive support for ISO files, both DVD and BD ISOs will be played, both as a network and from USB media. With audio files the Playon!DVRHD performs well- Ogg, Flac and Aac/M4a can be played as easy as playing MP3, WMA and WAV. The Playon!DVRHD offers something no player in this price range currently provides, namely bitstream transmission of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. We took the acid test, and indeed, our receiver neatly detected TrueHD and DTS-HD MA signals from the various test files.

The AC Ryan Playon!DVRHD is currently quite unique in the market: there are practically no other devices equipped with a TV tuner, recording capabilities and expanded support for playback of digital files, especially in this price range.

The usefulness of the tuner in Holland is rather limited by the lack of an ability to connect a CAM and thus watch encrypted channels. In France, Germany and Great Britain there is a much larger pool of 'free to air' channels. We see potential for this version of the Playon!DVRHD as a device in the bedroom, to quickly see the news or look back a recorded sporting event. Of course it is possible for an external smart card tuner to connect to the video input and to include them, although the quality is limited by the (SD) composite signal and the Mpeg2 compression.

AC Ryan still has a suggested retail price of 229 Euros (without hard drive) for a very attractive product; the interface is pretty well developed and the device offers a large amount of functions. The possibility of HD audio (flawless TrueHD via DTS-HD MA requires improvement) loss-free forwarding to an external decoder will appeal to demanding users, things like ftp and remote access via the built-in Web server are fun for the enthusiast. Standard integration of YAMJ responds to the needs of film viewers. AC Ryan has a good reputation in terms of listening to customers and processing needs with regular firmware updates, which is a positive vote for the future. Improvement of the network performance is a small but important breakthrough, in our opinion.

Because of these reasons and the large amount of functionality for a satisfactory price, we find the Playon!DVRHD is worthy of our Hardware.Info Bronze Award. If a CI module was present, it would have been a Silver Award”


Entire Review: http://nl.hardware.info/reviews/1801/ac ... t---deel-1