ACRyan PlayOn! HD Range Gets Firmware Update – New GUI & HFS+ Support Added

Written by Rob Nichols on August 31, 2010 · Filed under Software 

You may remember not too long ago I reviewed the impressive media player from ACRyan, the PlayOn! HD Mini media centre. At the time I gave it a positively glowing review, but for one standard of the user interface (UI).

Well, ACRyan has addressed the issue and their developers have come up with a huge firmware update released last week, which includes dramatic changes to the user interface amongst other important changes.

The home screen, whilst keeping a consistent layout, has been replaced by a far more glossy and polished design. The entire collection of icons has been replaced and a new, darker and more effective logo has been placed at the top.

Altogether a much needed and well implemented media centre software update, which although may not drastically change much in terms of functionality, just makes the entire experience of navigating the PlayOn! HD Mini that bit better, taking it perhaps closer to the user experience on rival devices, such as the WDTV, which has an accomplished UI.

There are also slight tweaks to the settings too, with changing resolutions a far easier experience than the nightmare we had before where you had to manually set a series of red lines to the edge of the screen, which ultimately left you with an obscure resolution.

There were several other key changes, which do nothing but improve the experience, to name but a few they have added HFS+ file system support, great for mac users, as well as improving the system of adding movie cover art to your media library. Now, it is a simple task of placing each movie in an individual folder along with the corresponding JPEG. In addition to this they have also added Dolby Digital Plus downmix support and fixed a few minor bugs.

So overall the changes haven’t been comprehensive, but in my opinion it gives the PlayOn! HD media centre range the little nudge they needed in order to compete with the more accomplished products from other manufacturers.