AC Ryan PlayOn DVR

AC Ryan PlayOn! DVR 1TB review

We loved AC Ryan's first foray into media extenders. The PlayOn!HD Mini walked away with the PC Format gold award thanks to its intuitive, focused way of trivialising the whole process of getting media from your PC onto the big screen. Its latest box, the PlayOn! DVR of tricks takes that basic remit and bolts on digital video recording. Available as a bare unit or with a hard drive pre-installed, this could be the box you've been waiting for. The unit boasts twin tuners, so you can record digital TV while watching another channel, or time-shift what you're watching. You can set up recordings for channels using the Electronic Programming Guide, or as this is essentially a PC in a lounge-friendly box, you can also use the web interface to set it to record whilst at work, on holiday or anywhere else where you have access to a browser. Multi-tasker There's nothing new about Digital Video Recorders, of course, but what's new here is that it does all that while enabling you to play back media from your USB sticks and from your home networks. The unit supports a healthy number of video and audio formats, easily handling everything we threw at it without complaint.