With your idiot box could do more
than flick through broadcast TV channels? We rounded up media players and smart
TVs that get your digital media, streaming video services, YouTube, and web
content into the lounge.
If you own any sort of digital media be it
movies, music or photos by now you’ll probably have heard of media players. The
main utility of media players is, as the name implies, playing digital media on
your TV. Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean storing your media as well
though some media as well though some media players come with built-in herd
drivers, the majority don’t. They all have network connectivity and USB ports.
These give you access to either media stored on your home network on a PC or NAS
drive, or a connected USB hard drive, for playback of stored material.
Video and audio is sent to your TV or home
theatre system, and you get a remote control for browsing all your digital
content, playback controls system settings and so forth.
You might already have some of this
functionality much as plain old mobile phones are supplanted by smartphone,
televisions have been going through a transformation into so-called “smart
TVs”.
The most common implementation of smart
functionality uses apps programs that either come preinstalled on the device or
are downloaded from an online marketplace. Examples include Skype, news and
weather feeds. It’s also common for smart TVs to have an internet browser so
you can surf the net just like on a regular PC.
It is not just about web access though
arguably the more important feature of smart TVs is how they can connect and
interface with other devices in your home.
Take Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA)
support for example some smartphones also support this technology, allowing you
to instantly stream movies, music and photos to your DLNA-enabled TV from those
devices.
Steaming content services, such as
Quickflix, are also appearing on the humble telly: you can pay to instantly
stream some of the latest movies and shows straight to your TV.
We checked out five current New
Zealand-available media players and four smart TVs, to see which offer the best
“smart” media experiences.
A.C. Ryan Playon! HD2
Media player
Two years ago we reviewed the A.C Ryan
Playon!HD Mini media player. We liked it so much that we rated it 9 out of 10.
This month we have a new, bigger model from A.C. Ryan called the Playon! HD2.
It’s available in NZ stores for around $199 (RRP $229).
The shiny, black Playon! HD2 is quite big
for a media player, thanks to the inclusion of an internal 3.5-inch hot-swap
drive bay. That allows you to slot in your own hard drive- no drive is included
in the purchase price.
Feed
me: takes a 3.5-inch hard drive for storage
If your media is stored on a PC, you could
transfer it to a 3.5-inch SATA hard drive, put that drive into the Playon!HD2,
and have instant access to that data on your TV.
If you don’t fancy cracking your PC open to
swap drives in and out, then you could simply put a new hard drive into the
unit and transfer files from a PC via the supplied USB 3.0 cable.
Along with the USB 3.0 port you also get
two USB 2.0 ports that connect devices such as portable hard drives, keyboards
and wireless dongles. Speaking of which, the wireless dongle is an optional
extra which sells for $49. Products priced similarly to the Play on! HD2, like
the Western Digital WD TV Live, come with built-in Wi-Fi adapters, so A.C.Ryan
loses points for this in our books.
There’s wired Ethernet port for a standard
LAN connection, plus HDMI, component and composite video outputs for connecting
to your TV.
Digital audio is provided via both optical
and coax outputs.
I hooked up the Play on! HD2 to my 1080p
Plasma telly and found that the user interface has been completely redesigned since
the older Mini-series. The remote has an excellent layout, and the entire thing
looks great and is easy to navigate. However, there’s a noticeable lag between
pressing a button on the remote and the corresponding action on screen. This
might not be a deal-breaker for most people but I found it very frustrating.
File support was excellent, just like the
previous A.C. Ryan unit, and all the standard- issue internet apps such as
Facebook, You Tube, Shoutcast and Picasa were present.
The feature that killed the Playon!HD2
(literally) was YAMJ – ‘Yet Another Movie Jukebox’. In theory, you connect the
unit to your PC, run the YAMJ client, and it will download meta data for your
media: movie artwork, synopses, and critic ratings. Sounds great, right?
In reality, the YAMJ client is the worst
program I’ve ever had the displeasure of using. The graphical menu gives only
the most basic of library location options, everything else is controlled via
either command line interface or manual editing of configuration files.
What’s worse is that after running the
client and trying to access the jukebox on the television, the unit froze and
wouldn’t restart. Not even a hard reset would bring it back to life. Looking at
user comments online it appears I’m not the only one to encounter this problem.
Even assuming A.C. Ryan fixes this
catastrophic bug in a update, the Playon! HD2 is a pretty average media player.
The internal drive bay is a cool feature but the menu system needs some serious
performance tuning, and including a wireless adapter wouldn’t hurt.
At a glance
·
Gigabit network media player (WiFi dongle
optional)
·
Internal 3.5-inch SATA drive bay
·
Good codec support
·
Serious bugs and performance issues
A.C.Ryan Playon!HD2
Price: $229 (media player), $49 (Wireless-n
adapter)
Contact: www.acryan.com
Could be a great media player with a few
performance tweaks and bug fixes, but decidedly avoidable as-is
Value: 4/10
