WD TV2 Vs AC Ryan Playon

spillcoe

Been looking to buy a media player for a while now and can't decide what to get. More or less had my mind set on buying the new WDTV but then I saw the AC Ryan Playon so I could use some help regarding which is the best. I've seen plenty of info on the WDTV but not too much on the Playon, although it does get some pretty good reviews here and here.

The AC Ryan is 250 EUR in Komplett, just wondering is the extra expense justified by the included hard drive, ability to record from the TV, wireless dongle, and decent HDMI cable? From what I can tell both support most formats (I'm open to correction on this).

spillcoe

Anyone?

MediaTank

What do you require from media player and then we can help?

spillcoe

I will be mostly using it to watch downloaded movies and TV shows. I don't have a big hard drive at the moment so this, along with the fact that I would prefer not to have a separate hard drive and media player means I'm leaning towards the Playon at the moment.

Adam anto

Hi,

I got the WDTV Live. Great little box but the firmware that WD released with it is not up to scratch yet.. Most things work well, but it has some issues with playing files over the network. Some people say they have had trouble finding shares on their network also. I didn't have this problem as my files are on a NAS drive.
The reason I went for it was because it didn't have a hard drive. My take on it is that it's going to be sitting under my tv so the last thing I want is to have a noisy hard drive whizzing around.
If you're into 'tweaking' these boxes there is a guy who's writing a 3rd party firmware that could be good.

All in all it's a good box but WD should really not treat the public as beta testers.

There could be other problems that I haven't come across yet!!!

MediaTank

spillcoe wrote: »

I will be mostly using it to watch downloaded movies and TV shows. I don't have a big hard drive at the moment so this, along with the fact that I would prefer not to have a separate hard drive and media player means I'm leaning towards the Playon at the moment.

Do you need network capability, bittorrent, and what formats do you wish to view the media in?

clansman

If you're into 'tweaking' these boxes there is a guy who's writing a 3rd party firmware that could be good.

where can you get this tweak from?

Adam anto

There's a guy called b-rad that's writing the firmware. Do a search for him and you'll be there.

You could wreck your box by messing with the firmware. Just thought I'd say it...

spillcoe

MediaTank wrote: »

Do you need network capability, bittorrent, and what formats do you wish to view the media in?

I do need network capability, I use bittorrent to download stuff, not really sure how it works on the media players but ideally I would use it and most of the media will be MPEG4.

MediaTank

Try the Popcorn Hour - popcornhour.com

spillcoe

I've looked at the Popcornhour before and the lack of an integrated hard drive put me off. What makes you recommend this over the AC Ryan Playon?

MediaTank

spillcoe wrote: »

I've looked at the Popcornhour before and the lack of an integrated hard drive put me off. What makes you recommend this over the AC Ryan Playon?

It can accomodate a hard drive, you buy one separately and slot it in. You could also go for one of the other NMT models from eGreat, HDX, iSTAR etc. which are OEMed Popcorn Hour systems.

The first reason why I'd go for these models over the AC Ryan or any of the brand new systems on the market, is jsut that they are new and hence are buggy and will need a whole cycle of firmware updates before they are ready as consumer electronics. The second reaon is the community support for NMT devices is second to none and the open Linux based core has meant that their is a plethora of free software available for these devices.

dubguy45

Dont be fooled by the popcorn hour stuff. Support is only there for their new products and they are bugged to death. Their support forum is full of complete a**holes. I have an NMT unit but would consider something else.