Picked up an AC Ryan
PlayonDVR PV76120 media player and 1Tb from Esquire so I can watch my movie and video collection directly on a TV.
The media player component works well and played all the video formats I threw at it. During testing comparing with my PC for some movies the background music & sounds were louder than speech and for one large 5Gb blueray mkv rip I tested the background video was flashing . Possibly due to how the videos was encoded but otherwise I am happy with the media player.
As with all of the popular media players the device supports
Yet Another Movie Jukebox software which allows you to scan your media collections for information like: year, language, fps, audio & video codecs and fetches information and photos from sites like
imdb and generates the indexes in HTML format that you can view while using the jukebox mode in the media player.
Connectivity options are a strong point with USB, ESata, Cat5 and WiFi (optional) supported. Connection to television is through RCA or HDMI.
What make the PlayOn DVR different compared to the PlayOn HD is that it can also play and record digital television signals and comes with a basic antenna with a magnetic foot if you don't have one for input.
South Africa has only analog TV but there is a Sentech test digital transmission for the SABC channels in my area using DVB-T the standard the device supports.
During testing I was surprised how good the quality was when I used the little antenna indoors. Huge difference compared to analog TV with bunny ears.
Basic recording and scheduling works as expected. However that is only for digital channels where you can watch one channel and record another.
Satellite/DSTV device can be recorded but you have to use the PlayonDVR AV-IN for this purpose meaning you can't watch another channel while recording.
The drive wanted a separate partition for timeshifting on first use and you can only select between the range of 1 Gb and 4Gb depending how many minutes you want the time shift period to support.
Unfortunately only very specific internet features are supported.
These are :
- Add and view your own RSS feed
- View Picasa and Flickr RSS.
- Add & listen to internet radio channels
- Bittorent
So the device makes you wish it could do more on the internet side. Would have been nice if it had more internet features like an inbuilt browser to surf the internet on or even support for sites like youtube.
From the PlayOnDVR website you can download the source code all models including the 76120 but as of yet haven't found a active community modifying the source code.
The
support forum for the device is very quiet and firmware updates only fix bugs so in does not compare that well in this regards to media player only devices like the
Medi8or.
After
updating the firmware to v8.3.2.r3582 I saw no no extra functionality or visual changes.
So in summation if you are looking for a media player and recorder combo the PlayonDVR is decent and probably the only the device on the market that combines a media player,TV,DVR & basic internet functionality making it a cool gadget.
However keep in mind in future the first manufacturer that combines a media player, DVR and an opensource product that allows you to make full use of the internet will shake up this market. Embedding the open source operating system Android or
ChromeOS with media player/DVR devices is definitely the future and will happen. The question is just when. Up until then I need a media player v1 so I am happy with my PlayOn DVR.
