These player packs a punch when playing all your beloved collection...but that's about it...please read on...
Got mine last week from a friend who went on a business trip in NZ.
I got the PV73100 P+ (Updated Playon HD 1 - can play TrueHD and stuff) as I just need a no non-sense player (plus limited budget).
It pretty much plays any file types I throw at it...which is basically a given as it's a media player. But again, that's about it.
Other that it's aesthetic design and an updated firmware (which I'm not sure if it's an advantage really...saved me from the pains of upgrading as upgrade path is very confusing from the official AC Ryan forums..)...below are some of my gripes:
- GUI 2.0 firmware looks really nice and savvy....but is effing slooowwww! It's like click-and-wait-then-click-again(thanks to it's old Realtek processor and limited memory capacity - I heard the old but ugly one is better in functionality, but I may be wrong). I mostly end up with twice pressing buttons to make the player respond. Really frustrating!
- I finally completed configuring .nfo files for my movies as required by yamj for the jukebox features (took me two days!)...ran yamj and the index file was generated. I plugged the unit in my LED TV, accessed jukebox on the menu only to end up more frustrated. When pressing "OK" on the message box asking if it's the first time I ran the new index file...the player hanged on me twice. Third time and it rebooted. Selecting "Cancel" on the fourth try finally showed the jukebox screen. Not really sure though if it's really that way though. Jukebox looks fine the first time, but noticed a slight difference (movie bucketing/filters is on top) in the final result as compared from my trial results of around 12 movies only. Looking at the details, Movie Title is truncated, commas are misplaced on the Actors field, Director field still shows XML tags before and after the Director name. Rating is incorrect as well. In fairness, I think that accuracy is 95% on movie posters selection - well probably due to the imdb links I painstakingly provided in the movie folders individually. Series collections were treated correctly as well.
- Samba is on but I can't seem to make it work. I would probably need to read more as I feel that it's mostly my fault.
- YouTube also does not work. Error messages when playing video files. Have not tried the other apps. Don't really need it anyway.
To sum up, my experience with this brand isn't really that good considering that this was my first NMT. I'd probably rate it at 4 on the scale of 1 - 10 where 10 is the highest.
What I'm doing now? I'm seriously back reading the Playon HD forums and other NMT forums trying to possibly alleviate my situation. Sad as I found out a lot have the same complaints as well.
I'm now considering the mede8er firmware - which I read in the forums (yes even AC Ryan Official forums) will work and may make user experience better (plus that wonderful Movie Wall).
The hardware is great, no question about it. But user experience always as always makes a big difference really.
Note to myself - I should have gotten the HD2 or that egr...grrrr talaga! LOL!
It just occurred to me - should I downgrade the firmware to the old (and ugly) version?
Thanks for reading. Let me know your thoughts people.
