Easyrider's Playon HD mini review thread.

R4z0r said:
That's really good to hear. I'm thinking of ripping all my DVD's and blu rays to a NAS so that I can get at all my movies from any room in the house. Are your blu-ray rips full quality - I'd be interested to know how it deals with an uncompressed blu ray rip?

Judging by the AC Ryan forums there seems to be a lot of issues with these boxes... Still, there seems to be a lot of developer activity so hopefully they will get the problems sorted out.
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Well all my blu ray rips are 1080p although my TV only doesw 1080i and 720p and the picture quality to me looks bloody good.

There are some issues but tbh i havent suffered any major issues...a few times its had issues picking up my ext hd and loading up the YAMMJ app but a restart usually sorts it out.

For what it is...its definitely worth it.
 
I'm about to buy. I've looked at the issues but compared to my PS3 streaming from PS3 Media server it can't be any worse seeing as that bombs out a lot, or at least tsMuxer has a habit of breaking....playing a file ok one minute then refusing to play it the next time.
 
Spawn said:
Well all my blu ray rips are 1080p although my TV only doesw 1080i and 720p and the picture quality to me looks bloody good.

There are some issues but tbh i havent suffered any major issues...a few times its had issues picking up my ext hd and loading up the YAMMJ app but a restart usually sorts it out.

For what it is...its definitely worth it.
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Cool, that's really good to hear :) Have you tried playing a 1080p rip across the network?

I'm almost certainly going to get one of these. From my research, it looks like the popcorn hour range is a lot more polished but I'm not keen on the form factor or the price as I want to put a device in each room.Judging by the amount of development happening at AC Ryan it looks like the Playon should catch up quite a bit over the coming months/year.
 
R4z0r said:
Cool, that's really good to hear :) Have you tried playing a 1080p rip across the network?

I'm almost certainly going to get one of these. From my research, it looks like the popcorn hour range is a lot more polished but I'm not keen on the form factor or the price as I want to put a device in each room.Judging by the amount of development happening at AC Ryan it looks like the Playon should catch up quite a bit over the coming months/year.
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If you check AC Ryans site, their new GUI does look very nice. Plus they've actually released firmware to deal with MKVs with compressed headers :)

I'll give my verdict in a couple of weeks, moving next week so won't be messing around.
 
R4z0r said:
Cool, that's really good to hear :) Have you tried playing a 1080p rip across the network?

I'm almost certainly going to get one of these. From my research, it looks like the popcorn hour range is a lot more polished but I'm not keen on the form factor or the price as I want to put a device in each room.Judging by the amount of development happening at AC Ryan it looks like the Playon should catch up quite a bit over the coming months/year.
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I have tried it and tbh i wasnt that impressed...my network is 10/100 and it just kept stuttering every so often so its obvious that my network isnt quite fast enough...plus i found it easier to just plug an ext usb hd into the playon box then connect the hdmi cable to my tv...that way i dont get the drop outs and it streams perfectly fine.

Seriously just get the box...buy a cheap ext hd...put your blu ray rips on it and away you go...simple and effective.
 
easyrider said:
The new Gui 2 does look good
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Is there a download link for the new GUI as my box has the latest firmware 3582...thats what it came with as far as i know...checked last night and saw that my firmware was the same as the one currently on AC Ryan.

Unless the new GUI is in the new firmware, which in that case i guess i have it.
 
easyrider said:
The new GUI will be included in the new firmware very soon m8
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Yep i just checked over at their forums and by god the GUI looks bloody amazing...hopefully it wont be too long before it goes official...it really does look nice very nice.
 
The current GUI does make it look slightly cheap.

When the new on e is out this will be a bargain streamer as thats all that was lacking for me
 
Right i seem to be having an issue with YAMMJ and EMM...for some odd reason i cant seem to get EMM working or im doing something wrong...probably something im doing.

Anyhow currently my set up is like this:
I have my ext hd connected to the playon hd mini via usb...now whenever i add a new rip or file...i connect my ext hd to my laptop...copy it over then run the YAMMJ updater which updates the file with the correct boxcover etc etc. But i dont get any other info so decided to download EMM but i dont know if i have it set up properly. Anyhow installed EMM and set it up according to what Mittens posted earlier but it doesnt work because as soon as i connect my HD to my playon...turn the player on and scroll to my jukebox...its still the same ie nothing has changed. I have the EMM settings set to scan my ext hd ie i have the EMM pointing my HD which named F:, so at the moment its named F:laptop stuff/jukebox as thats where ive pointed the EMM.

Now is that right or am i doing something wrong because i dont know what to do or where im going wrong...if someone can list a step by step instruction guide i would be most grateful and ill throw in a few internet cookies:p
 
After playing around and watching a few films I have to say, this is a very impressive bit of kit.

The only thing it's struggled with so far is a Transformers II rip. (22GB file size)

On the IMAX scenes the box seems to be struggling to cope. I know it's not the NAS as my old media pc works perfectly.

As below (this is the scene where Optimus fights several Decepticons in th woods)- If the data rate goes above ~4.5MB/s the box really does struggle.

83739257.jpg


Reading the AC Ryan forums this seems to be because the processor in the box is overloaded due to it having to process the network traffic too.

This is the only negative I could find and with the GUI being sorted hopefully this will be addressed as well.
 
More updates (and thread hijacking :p)

After following the below guide (with some tweaking)

Linky

I've now got my FreeNAS mapped to the player via NFS (and more importantly using the tcp protocol as it really didn't like udp) and is shown under the USB section and has improved playback on the Transformers file - It's still not perfect and skips here and there. I think the player must deal with the overheads of NFS better than it copes with the Samba share.

I quickly had a go at setting up YAMJ and got the program to fully index all the files. My index.htm file has been generated and loads perfectly with correct info but due to the funky way I have this setup the links created don't path correctly to the files on the share. More play time required I think!
 
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