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Playback quality is just as good as before, and while it won't offer the same level of adjustment as an Nvidia or AMD graphics card, it delivers well saturated, clear, clean images, especially with high quality source files.
AC Ryan have told us that the chipset is optimised for ‘Full HD Streaming', which to be honest we already had with the previous version of the player. I was able to stream 1080p MKV files across the network to the original Playon! HD unit without frames being dropped. As this system has a gigabit enabled port I was curious to see how quickly it could transfer files from a QNAP 639 Pro NAS system to the internal drive.
Below we have included a video of a 1.4GB MKV HD file which we are transfering to the internal hard drive across a network powered by several Belkin 16 port 1GBit switches.
Sadly the product doesn't get close to Gigabit speeds when transfering data to the internal drive. We measured performance and it was only slightly more than 100mbit across our network. 1080p content streams fine however which is a more important aspect for a ‘Network Media Player'.
AC Ryan told us “The processor is unable to handle large data packets via the same Gigabit Ethernet port. For a standalone NAS system, the chipset used is better meant to handle data transfer, and Gigabit Ethernet improves this by providing a larger bandwidth.
This is not an uncommon problem with media players, with the current Sigma processor also handling high bitrate streaming via their Gigabit port, but data transfer is relatively the same as our players on Realtek. At the moment Realtek is tweaking the data packets configuration to improve in this area, but it will not achieve the intended data transfer rates due to the processor limitation.”
One of the new additions to the product is Social Media functionality. Obviously you need to be connected to a network with internet access.
There are a plethora of options available, such as Twitter, YouTube, FlickR, Picasa and ebuddy. AC Ryan have included the option to use a USB keyboard and mouse which means you can access your social networking sites, or even instant message friends without having to rely on a remote control.
All of these sections open into a well organised menu interface which is intuitive to use. The videos can also be viewed in full screen.
Copying over USB 3.0 proves much better than the gigabit lan interface, averaging a very tasty 127 MB/s.
