A.C. Ryan Playon!HD2 (PV73700) media streamer

The A.C. Ryan Playon!HD2 (PV73700) is more than just a high-definition media streamer: It can act as an external USB drive, a network-attached storage (NAS) device, a UPnP media server, an FTP server, a BitTorrent downloader, and it will even let you use Twitter and Facebook through your TV. Indeed, it's a feature-packed and versatile device, and it's not too difficult to use. However, it could use more processing power and a faster interface, and also much better functionality.

Physical features and media streaming capability

As a media streamer, the Playon!HD2 is great. It can play a large range of files (including MKV) and can decode plenty of different video formats (including H.264). We had no problems getting it to play our range of test files and its performance and image quality were very good. Files can be played either though attached USB drives, through your network, or off an internal hard drive.

The A.C. Ryan doesn't ship with a hard drive, but it has a slot on its left side through which you can attach a 3.5in, SATA-based drive up to 2TB in capacity. The right side has an SDHC card slot, two host USB ports (type A) that allow external hard drives to be attached (one of the ports is USB 3.0); there is also a USB 3.0-based (type B) port, which allows the A.C. Ryan to be attached to a computer as if it were an external hard drive (which it pretty much is in that situation).

The rear of the AC Ryan contains the Gigabit Ethernet port and its video and audio output connections. You can use HDMI, Component, Composite, analog audio or digital audio (coaxial and optical). We connected it to our Samsung Series 6 LCD TV using HDMI. The resolution was not auto-detected by the player, so we had to go in to the set-up menu to choose 1080p.

Menu interface and functionality

The menu interface of the AC Ryan is decent, and we found it easy to use for the most part. We like the main page of the menu, which along with listing the main menu items also lists recently added music and video files — although it is a short list. It can separate files according to whether they are video or audio, and you can quickly access these by going directly to the Movies or Music options in the main menu. It has the ability to combine listings from the internal drive and any attached USB drives, which can be convenient, but it also means that file listings can be very long and slow to get through. You can browse files stored on network locations by going through the File Manager.

The menu interface isn't all that quick and it can take up to a second before an option is changed after you've pressed the button on the remote — it also seemed to get slower the longer the streamer had been running. The file sorting feature could use work: by pressing the menu button, you can filter by file type (movies, music, photos) and change the view to thumbnails, but you can't make it show recently-added files first. Recent files only show up on the main screen of the menu, and only five videos and two music files are shown.

If you enable the A.C. Ryan's UPnP feature (which can be done through the Setup-Network menu), it will show up as a device in your local area network. The internal hard drive and any USB drives that are attached to the A.C. Ryan will show up as shared drives and you will be able to drag and drop files onto those drives. This makes the A.C. Ryan function like a makeshift NAS (network attached storage) device. It's very convenient to add files to the internal hard drive over the network, rather than having to attach the streamer to a computer via USB. However, sometimes the internal drive wasn't listed alongside shared USB drives on the network and we had to restart the streamer in order for it to show up. In fact, the first draft of this review criticised the device for not allowing network access to the internal hard drive. You can also copy or move files from USB drives or network locations to the internal hard drive by pressing the 'Edit' button on the remote control. We tested with the latest version of the firmware available to us at the time (v9.5.3.r2988).

Web features and BitTorrent

If you access the A.C. Ryan's Web management interface (by typing the player's IP address in the URL bar of your browser with the port 1024 at the end; for example, 192.168.1.3:1024 — we had to Google this) it gives you the option to upload files to the internal hard drive and also to download files from it to your computer. This didn't work well in our tests and managed to crash Firefox a few times.

The most important part of the Web interface is that it allows you to use the player's BitTorrent function. If you open torrent files through its interface (after you've saved them to your computer's hard drive), you can then download files directly onto the media streamer's internal hard drive. In our tests, files downloaded with the same speed they would have had we used a PC-based torrent program such as uTorrent. Our quibble with this feature is that finished torrents don't show up in the recently added file list nor in the Movie or Music folders (depending on the file type). You have to navigate to the BT folder in order to access the downloaded files.

In addition to streaming local media, the A.C. Ryan has a lot of Internet-based features and some of it works very well. In particular, we love the unit's ability to stream music from SHOUTcast and to play videos from TED Talks (which is part of the streamer's Video Podcasts feature). Its YouTube, Picasa and Flickr functionality is basic but usable, and it can also display the weather (via Yahoo!). It can also take you to the Twitter and Facebook Web sites, and warns you that for the best experience you should attach a USB-based keyboard — we definitely won't argue with that. You'll get nowhere trying to type with the on-screen keyboard and the remote's arrow keys.

The remote itself could be better. Its buttons feel too squishy, it's too slim, it doesn't have dedicated buttons for accessing videos, photos and music directly (there is a 'files' button, but this only takes you to the 'Devices(All)' screen and doesn't actually show any files), and its navigation buttons are poorly laid out. For example, the skip buttons are not located near the play and forward and rewind buttons, but instead opposite the volume buttons. It's definitely not as good as the remote that ships with the Netgear NeoTV NTV550.

Conclusion

With so many features, it's hard not to like the A.C. Ryan Playon!HD2, but we can't help think that it could be a little better. A few interface tweaks, a little more speed and a much better remote control could make it one of the best media streamers on the market. Nevertheless, it's still worth checking out if you want something that's more than a basic media streamer.

Update: Originally we said that the player doesn't allow you to copy files from USB or network drives. It actally does. In order to copy files, you have to press the Edit button on the remote, which we somehow missed the first time around (we never read the manual). This brings up the File Editing menu. From here you can copy, delete, move or rename files. We have ammended the review accordingly.

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