PlayOn! DVR TV Up & Running

We have connected the PlayON! DVR TV via HDMI to a 32 inch LG LCD TV. Starting the device up takes a bit of time. Roughly around 30 seconds. After which you see the main menu. It consists of six large icons, each of which are pretty easy to understand. First off, during our testing the menu felt sluggish most of the time, responding slowly to the presses on the remote control. At times I found myself pressing the same button multiple times, thinking that the IR sensor did not pick the signal up. Most of the time, I ended up somewhere completely different as a result, as these key presses were processed all at once after 2-3 seconds. That said, the IR sensor of the device is not the greatest either.
Overall, the interface is clean but somewhat boring and crude at times. It reminds me a bit of the OEM MP4 players from Asia. But, before we get started on the functionality, let us take a quick look at the settings part of the device.

Settings


The overall interface of the PlayOn! is quite easy to understand. The settings area consists of vertical tabs and horizontal choices within each tab. The right area of these choices displays the information of each selected sub-menu item. "ATV" stands for analogue TV, which we will not really get into, as this is just a simple TV tuner also available in every TV set out there, while DVB-T is short for "Digital Video Broadcast - Terrestrial". This means that you can only view "over-the-air" digital broadcasts. The next two tabs are "Audio" and "Video", in which you may set the format of each type to best fit your needs. You may select which way to output the audio and what format the TV output should be like. In our case, audio was sent over HDMI and the video output was set to 16:9.


The next tab is called "Recording", in which you may set in what quality to record in, how to time the chapters so you may jump between them, how to act with timeshift and where to store the recorded material. In the "Network" tab you may set your connectivity - be it wired or wireless. It also gives you the ability to turn on "NAS mode" which makes the device accessible as a network attached storage. Sadly, by doing so, you will loose all other functionality until you close the message box. While this is an annoyance, it is a step up from some of the other media players out there, which require a restart to enter NAS mode.


The "System" tab gives you control over the display language, the time and date, parental control, hard drive format and the possiblity to restore the defaults of the device. Lastly, the "MISC" tab gives you some information about the device firmware, hard drive information and gives you the ability to control the slide show speed and the background music when presenting such a show. Our unit came with the EcoGreen F2 Samsung 502HI hard drive, with 5400 RPM, 16 MB cache and 8.9 ms access time.

DVB-T

Austria has a four real channels and four information channels available for your viewing pleasure. Searching for these takes quite some time, but since this is a one time process, I am inclined to oversee such a small shortcoming. Each channel is then shown along with some information. As you can see, the on-screen menu of the channel shows me that the movie - in this case "The Green Mile" - is being broadcast in German at 480P, yes we Europeans are no where close to what the US has for digital broadcast. Channel switching time is adequate, being a tad bit slower than on a normal TV set. I should mention, that DVB-T is not really useful yet as there are simply not enough channels being broadcast over the air like that, at least not in Europe.

Media Player

The second area of interest ist the media player. This gives you access to videos, audio files and pictures stored on various locations. The PlayON! can access the internal hard drive, an attached USB device, the network or use a play list to play one item after another from various locations. Video playback is flawless and the audio is always in sync as well. Once you select a video file, the movie will start playing in a little window on the right within the interface. Hitting "enter" on the remote then goes into fullscreen and starts the movie from the beginning. Sadly there is no feature to allow you to continue where you left off from. The audio menu is easily accessible as well. The test album played perfectly fine over the TV speakers and all the information accessible through the MP3 file meta data was correctly displayed on the screen as well. No album cover was shown, which would have been a nice feature as well.

Internet Radio

Internet radio seems to get the station listing from Shoutcast as it seems. You first get a list of all the stations, which you may sort in various ways. After choosing the station you want to listen to, select one of the servers and the music starts playing along with some information about the station and current song.

ATV, A/V Input & Playback

These three areas do exactly that and there is really no need for pictures. The ATV allows you to view analog TV, which should come in handy if you are using an LCD monitor without a built-in tuner. The channel switching times are similar to that of DVB-T, which is a bit slower than most modern TVs. A/V Input allows you to connect external audio or video devices to the PlayON!. This should be interesting for those who have a camcorder and want to transfer it to the device as you can record whatever you are currently watching. These inputs act the exact same way as the ones on the TV. Simply select the wanted input and it is displayed on the screen. Finally, the Playback functionality does just that. It plays back your recorded media as you can see in the picture above. This is different from the audio and video files you have stored on the device itself.