I have had a Mini for more than a year now, and my experience is that every time a new firmware is released, some of the existing features would be broken! No exception thus far!

To me it seems like there is no proper code review or the ACR test team is either not critical enough or they just test all the "smart/new" features instead of making sure that nothing of the existing feature sets has been broken by all those "smart/new" stuff.

Yes I understand that, I have had Netgear EVA which had maybe the most satisfied and dissatisfied customers at the same time. When it comes to Mini you have the possibility to downgrade the FW to a more functioning one if the bugs in current FW are not acceptable. I never use the jukebox for instance as I found the implementation has always been fundamentally flawed. With other bugs in the FW I can just about to live with, only bigger gripe being the audio passthrough/middle channel problem.

But I agree that there doesn't seem to be a well established test framework in use in ACR software development.

Please can you tell me how to disable the repeat all. When playing MP3s etc. There is the option 'repeat off' in the menu, but then it stops after 1 file........

This is currently confirmed, it's not really a bug but how the software works at the moment. We have noted on this though and will try to improve since we do agree here. Anyways we will let you once we have more feedback from our developers regarding this. It has been raised so i will do it again.

thanks for your input & best regards,

Bedankt, wacht op update, verder niets dan lof!
(Thanks, awaiting your update, nothing but praise!)

I read this the other day, and something about it just rubs me the wrong way. Open sourcing the code that you hold the copyright too wouldn't be company suicide - it would almost certainly guarantee success. You would increase your customer base with enthusiasts, then normal people later when the open source nature pays off.

All the little annoyances that are present in the official firmware (and any software really) that you don't have time to fix would be fixed. We could have the ability to customise the font, font size and font colour without having to store it on a usb mass storage device - my girlfriend can't read it in GUI 2.0. We could have the interface work snappier, be able to configure where menu items appear (having the shortcuts option be the 5th option on the front page rather than the 1st makes it not so much of a shortcut), and a plethora of other things I cannot possibly fathom.

This whole device is built on open source, and arguably couldn't exist in its current form without open source. Open source is built to be used and spread, the intent of the GPL2 was to prevent this exact situation - the customer owning software (and I mean that literally) that they cannot change. There is an implicit moral obligation to give back to the community, and the fact its not a legal obligation is a bug in the licence - GPL3 fixes this. Perhaps you do give back, contributing to samba or even the kernel - I don't know!

I gather that the DvdPlayer binary comes from source that you don't hold the copyright too, but that's can't include the gui - can it?

If it's about the gui etc. you can already tweak that yourself. Just unpack the firmware make your changes (to the gui pictures and/or rss files) and repack it. If you need we can put up a lil guide on how to unpack / repack it. Tools which are needed for the newer firmwares would be unsquashfs and squashfs to unpack / repack the firmwares.
As for the dvdplayer app you are right we don't hold that source.


best regards,

Hi

A few days ago I purchased PlayOn!HD Mini with firmware v7.3.6 installed. I was able to play full HD movies from my UPNP (Mediatomb) server.
After I successfully updated firmware to the newest version (using safe mode), I am not able to play any MKV file from the same UPNP server disregarding if the resolution is 720 or 1080.
Files are still visible in the file browser but, almost immediately after selecting them, the message that file is removed from the server appears. In random occasions, after pressing "OK", device reboots.
Once, one of those movies started to play disregarding the fact that the message was still displayed on the screen, but with horrible stuttering.
The same movies which I previously transcoded to xVid/Avi using the same target resolution work fine, as well as others "normal" resolution files.

Additional details:
- The same MKV files viewed through NFS mount play relatively fine (Sometimes slightly stuttering).
- My Mediatomb server does not have transcoding enabled.
- My Panasonic DLNA enabled TV (Model TH-P42U30) connected to the same network hub can still play those files (Of course with limited success, depending on codec. And without subtitles. This was the reason why I purchased PlayOn!HD Mini).

This evening I will try to revert firmware to the old version to see if that will solve the problem.
I was planing to by one more device for my father, but I think the old interface is (for him) too much complicated and sluggish.

Dear sirs, please take notice of the problem I described. I hope it will be solved in the one of the next firmware revisions.
Thanks and best regards.

A guide would be great - I am working with Firmware_PV73200_v7.0.21.r4312_European.zip, so I will need to extract yaffs2_1.img.

i did not upgrade the firmware for more than 1 year. Every new release breaks existing features so i stay with my old release until at least all features that were promised when i bought the hd mini do work (i think internet radio does not work since a while with the old fw though) and until then stress the remote control until i finally reach the target folder to play videos. I only miss the shortcuts from the latest release but would also like to have a clock which is feeded by a timeserver to show up when i press information so that i don't need another clock in the living room.