User experience
Given that A.C.Ryan's receivers are smart-looking and cleverly designed, you'd expect similar levels of quality from the on-board operating system.
Unfortunately, this is an area in which the Playon!HD and Playon!HD mini - both of which use practically identical software - struggle to deliver.
When powering up the devices, you aren't greeted with a cute welcome message or a introductory video. Nope, instead, you get a big, ugly screen advising you to format any attached hard disk.
Sure, it's doing what's necessary and it ultimately gets the job done, but we'd expect a little more finesse from any device touting full-HD visuals on a big-screen display. In its current form, it's anything but easy on the eye.
After a quick format, the Playon!HD home screen shows an improvement, but the interface remains largely dull and unimpressive thanks to its drab use of blue and black.
There's clearly a trade off between devices in the market. An Apple TV or PlayStation 3, for example, might offer a vastly superior interface, but neither offer a comprehensive range of supported formats and codecs.
The Playon!HD, meanwhile, might not look anywhere near as sophisticated, but it will playback just about everything without kicking up a fuss.
The main screen, pictured above, provides shortcuts to the software's six primary menu options; Browser, Media Library, Feeds, Radio, File Copy and Setup.
You might confuse the Browser as a means to surf the web, but it is in fact a file browser that lets you navigate media stored on physically-attached or network-attached devices.
Once again, despite the big, dull menus, the interface is easy to navigate and quick to respond to button presses on the remote.
Wired to our router, the Playon!HD was able to automatically detect our NAS box and gain access by entering a username and password using an on-screen keyboard.
Starting with the basics, we played back a couple of MP3s and ran into more user interface frustrations. For reasons unknown to us, playing an MP3 results in a giant overlay appearing at the top of the screen.
It's far from pretty - and we couldn't find any visualisations - but hey, it works, and you can find files quickly by browsing through folders or filters such as genre, artist and album.
More importantly, movie playback works just as well, too. Although we admittedly didn't test each and every format supported by the receiver, it had absolutely no trouble playing back various 1080p MKV, MOV and AVI video files, as well as a DVD ISO image.
Playing back movies from the Playon!HD's internal hard drive proved to be particularly responsive, with playback starting in just a second or two, and fast-forward and skip actions responding quickly.
You'll spend most of your time in the Browser, but the other menu options do have their uses, too.
Media Library indexes all of your locally-stored content for easy navigation, Feeds (pictured below) provides easy-access to a few basic web services and Radio lets you stream web-based stations.
File Copy, as you might have guessed, lets you copy content from external or network-attached devices to either the Playon!HD's internal hard disk or another external drive.
Putting it to the test, we we were able to copy a 180MB movie trailer from a USB 2.0 memory stick to the Playon!HD's hard disk in a reasonable 14.8 seconds.
We couldn't help but notice a few more amusing interface elements along the way, though. When removing the USB stick, you get a bright-green on-screen message that reads "USB Plugged Off!". The lettering is big enough to ensure your nan could read it.
We've mocked the appearance of the interface in parts, but the good news is that A.C.Ryan's aware of the need for change, and has been working on a revamped firmware for some time.
Delving into the darker corners of the company's official forums, you can find pre-release beta firmware that begins to show off some of the improvements lying in wait.
Firmware upgrades can't be carried out over the air, unfortunately - and the install process has to be seen to be believed - but the latest beta release does provide a glimpse at a new-look home screen.
There don't seem to be many changes beneath the home page as yet, but we've seen glimpses of A.C.Ryan's second-generation interface and know that a better user experience isn't far away.
And, for users wanting a better solution to their backed-up movie library, A.C.Ryan's actively pursuing YAMJ (Yet Another Movie Jukebox) integration.
Trouble is, the last official firmware releases for the Playon!HD and Playon!HD mini date back to April and May, respectively. A number of beta releases have been made available in the interim, but the next official release can't come soon enough.
Looking at the two media players independently, there's little to separate them in terms of user experience, but the power consumption of the two units does vary.
During movie playback from a USB memory stick, we observed the Playon!HD - equipped with a 1TB hard disk - consuming 12W of power. The drive-less mini, meanwhile, consumed just 7W.
