Introduction

AC Ryan are most commonly known for their extensive range of after-market parts and modding supplies, designed to aid you in making your rig stand out from the crowd. It was therefore a bit of a surprise when they asked us to take a look at their PLAYON! HD- a network media player supporting full 1080p playback- something quite unrelated to modding supplies. However, we wouldn' t be much of a review website if we strayed on the side of caution, so we instantly bit AC Ryan' s hands off.

Viewing networked media on your TV is nothing new- it' s something that media centre PC' s have been doing for quite some time. However, whilst Media Centre PC' s offer oodles of features, they tend to cost a fair bit to build and set up as well as taking up a lot of space. It' s no surprise therefore that more and more dedicated media box' s have been emerging on the market, with AC Ryan' s PLAYON! HD being one of them.

Unfortunately the specification for the Playon on AC Ryan' s site is almost as long as the latest Harry Potter volume, so we' ve had to select the best bits. If you want to view the full specification, you can take a look here.

- Store, Play, Stream
- Digital audio, video & images
- HDMI 1.3 | Full HD 1080P
- Plays Full HD video formats/ codecs ( incl. MKV, RM/ RMVB, H.264 etc)
- UPNP / NAS Network HDD / Media Player
- Bittorrent Download
- Wired Network
- Wireless Network ( optional)
- Supports internal 3.5" SATA/ SATA2 Harddisk
- Supports external USB Harddisk / external USB storage
- USB2.0 Host for expansion with more USB drives
- Remote Control
Media file formats supports
Video Codecs:
- MPEG-1 / MPEG-2 / MPEG-4 SP/ ASP/ AVC ( H.264) / XviD / DivX / WMV9 ( VC-1) / RealVideo 8/ 9/ 10 ( up to 720P)
Content Formats:
- AVI / MKV / TS / TP / TRP / M2TS / MPG / MP4 / MOV / M4V / VOB / ISO / IFO / DAT / WMV / ASF / RM / RMVB / FLV resolution up to 720p / 1080i / 1080p
Audio Codecs:
- MP2 / MP3 / OGG Vorbis / WMA Std / PCM / LPCM / MS-ADPCM / LC-AAC / HE-AAC / COOK / RA-Lossless
Image: - HD JPEG / BMP / GIF / TIF / PNG

I' m sure you' ll agree, that is quite an impressive list of supported media formats, and should ensure maximum compatiability with existing media libraries. The rest of the specification is good, but nothing to get too excited about yet.