I have just bought a Playon!HD (ACR-PV73100) in Singapore on the strength of a demo and recommendation by a friend. Both of us have Mac networks at home.

I've installed and formatted a hard drive, hooked the box up to my TV using the analog cables, managed to figure out how to make the HDMI work with my LG TV (which is something I have never been able to do with my MacBook Pro) by using the Passthrough mode. I've copied a couple of movies to the hard drive using USB (and noticed that the TV interface is disabled when you do this, although this isn't mentioned in the manual) and I've been able to configure the WiFi to talk to my network.

However at this point I am stuck. I have no idea how to load files onto the hard drive so that I can play them and I cannot connect to my network in order to stream files. The only thing I have managed to make work is Internet Radio.

Now I'm not a newcomer to this business. I've been using computers for over 40 years, Ethernet and Token Ring networks since the early 90s and WiFi for over ten years and in all that time, I have never seen such a bad manual (and I've seen some bad ones). I thought perhaps that the Asian manual in the package might be the issue, so I downloaded another one, which wasn't much better.

The language and the grammar are not the issues - there are huge chunks of information that are missing and lots of terms and instructions are just vague or not explained. This is not just a Mac issue, since although the manual was clearly written from a Windows-centric point of view, it is just as bad with my Windows hat on.

What were you guys thinking?

So as other forum users have been asking, is there a simple, plain language, step-by-step instruction manual out there?

PS How did you manage to design the box with the USB ports upside down? The light on the WiFi dongle points downwards. Why isn't there a USB port on the back to protect the dongle?