ACRyan EU recently went bankrupt. The global website was online serving the firmwares and updates, but for now that website experiences problems as well and is not online. As such we have mirrored the Playon!HD2 and Playon!HD2 Mini firmwares on our download servers for you to be able to upgrade towards the latest firmware that they have released (v9.5.3.r7317).
The easiest method to upgrade is to copy the image towards a USB Flash disk. With the device powered down insert the USB stick. Then startup the device, go towards the menu and select upgrade from USB.
The PlayOn!HD series that's content playback of photos, music, but most of all video content. The last topic is where the PlayOn!HD specializes. Typically when we build a HTPC (Home Theater PC) we tend to put down significant money for a motherboard, processor, memory, power supply, storage and the chassis. And if the unit does not have a graphics subsystem, we often add a dedicated graphics card as well to be able to enjoy full 1080P content. A simple HTPC starts at 250~300 EUR really.
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This is what the PlayOn!HD 2 series does best, play back high-definition content, the units are based on a 500 MHz Realtek 1185 IC, specialized in media capabilities. The Playon!HD and Mini support JPEG HD, BMP, GIF, TIFF and PNG picture formats, while audio support covers MP2/3, OGG, WMA, WAV, AAC, COOK and FLAC, Dolby Digital or DTS pass-through and stereo down-mixing - even DTS-HD is supported.
When we look purely at the video side of things we notice that the box can play back anything you can think of, including HD MPEG 2/4, H.264, WMV9/VC-1 and RM/RMVB (up to 720p) codecs in AVI, ASF, DAT, FLV, MKV, M2TS, MP4, MOV, M4V, RM, TS, TP, TRP, VOB/ISO/IFO, WMV, and xVid/DivX containers with SRT, SMI, SSA, IDX and SUB subtitles and full menu video previews. And yes, there's even proper support for 1080p 24.
In this article we review the 1GB HDD version of the PlayOn!HD 2.
These boxes offer HDMI 1.3, proper component and composite video outputs, USB connectors (one 3.0) and even Gigabit Ethernet.
Model: AC Ryan ACR-PV73700 Playon!HD2 (and Mini)
Version: v9.5.3.r7317
Release: 2012-01-31
