AC Ryan Playon!HD

UPDATE 10/06/2011: AC Ryan has updated the firmware for this media centre. This latest version corrects a good number of the problems we noticed in our initial review and brings a new and improved internal interface to the product. There has been no change to the product's final score, but the review below has been updated accordingly.

A larger version of the Playon!HD mini, the AC Ryan Playon!HD (without the mini) is a very complete media centre. It can house a 3.5" hard drive, play HD video, display a video jukebox and even has an SDHC card reader. Really worth its salt? Let's see.

Given its similarity with the "mini" version, we're not going to spend tie talking about things that we've already covered for that model. Instead, we'll be concentrating on the differences between the two models. We'll also sum up its strong and weak points.


The major difference is that you can insert a 3.5" SATA internal hard drive into this media centre. There's also an SDHC reader on the side of the device, plus two USB sockets. The finish is fine and only the remote is slightly disappointing. Multimedia compatibility is identical to the mini version. Note that a BitTorrent client and a feature for accessing content via a network are available.

The big plus on this model is of course its compatibility with the YAMJ video jukebox system. For those who don't know this tool, it allows you to scan your video library (films and series) and look for relevant information (poster, synopsis, actors and so on) and to create a separate page for each title. Configuration isn't as simple as all that, but there's a pretty big online community for support or tutorials.


The weak points are still:

- Slow network speed, both wired and Wi-Fi (optional USB key on sale)
- Playback via the network is therefore very average: large MKV/1080p videos can be jumpy
- Web applications (Picasa, YouTube, FlickR) not much use
- DVD menus badly supported, display disrupted

For more information, take a look at our review of the AC Ryan Playon!HD mini.

Note: some of the media centres currently on sale have a Realtek RTD1073+ decoding chip. These chips give just one extra feature compared to those without the "+": they can send HD audio tracks (DTS HD MA/HR, DD TrueHD) in bitstream to an external audio amp via the HDMI. Unfortunately there's no way of knowing which you're getting when you buy your media centre.