In our tradition of buying ourselves a combined gift for Xmas, we have been thinking (for months!) about getting ourselves a media player so that we can listen to music and watch downloaded TV programmes from the computer alongside the usual watching the telly. We had been using a USB flash drive to play files through our DVD player, but the streaming was sometimes really slow giving jerky playback, not all file formats and codecs would play (eg Matroska/MKV), and the file browser was limited to first 8 characters - inconvenient when the episode number is at the end of the file name.
Our local computer shop PB Tech was selling Western Digital brands for a sale price over Xmas/New Year and we looked quite carefully at buying one of those. However - since we don't have a flat-screen TV with HDMI (yes we just have a decade-old Sony Trinitron), the WD unit was slightly unsuitable.
I spotted another box behind all the WD units in the cabinet and asked to have a look at it. This was the AC Ryan unit. "
Playon! HD" I'd heard the AC Ryan name before, and I vaguely remembered that it was a reputable brand, plus this unit had everything we needed on it for a similar price (including being able to play all the codecs and file formats we needed), so I bought it.
As it turns out - it's a great unit. We already had a 1TB SATA hard-drive to put in it - it had been sitting in our computer for a while, so it was 5 mins to pull it out and plug it into the AC Ryan through the removable bottom plate.
2 mins plugging it into the telly (there's three lots of video outs on it - HDMI, component and composite) and it was working!
Almost too easy.
One minor niggle is that because the HD was formatted NTFS in the computer, the AC Ryan wants to format it with its own file structure every time you start the unit, meaning you have to select "cancel".
We upgraded the firmware to see if that would fix it (it didn't) - took 5 mins to download and update via a USB flash drive. By the way, the unit has two regular USB ports, a USB host port and smartcard slot. When I get some time I'll transfer all the files off the existing hard drive and reformat it.
I had a spare long network cable to plug into the computer and we could easily browse the computer and stream files directly from it. In some ways - a smaller internal hard-drive would be fine, and you could just stream files directly from your own computer.
I guess for people without a computer you could just have the media player as a standalone unit. It has it's own bittorrent client, can listen to internet radio etc as well, although we haven't tried those yet.
We might look at getting wireless - you can just plug a wireless USB dongle into one of the ports and it will work, apparently. That would make it easier to drag the thing into the bedroom for late-night viewing.
This product apparently won
the HME Best Media Streamer 2009 Award so it's not too shabby and I'd definitely recommend it. It's Linux-based with great support on the AC Ryan forums - there are various customisations that can be done so it looks fairly future-proof.
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