A couple of weeks ago we tested the AC Ryan PlayOn!HD series media-players. With the new 2.0 GUI a thing or two have definitely improved over the initial launch of the product series.

Still, despite being interesting media-players, we found ourselves to running into a performance issue every now and then. High bit-rate 1080P movies for example were lagging when that bandwidth was peaking. That's the main reason why PlayOn!HD 2 was released a couple of months ago.

The interesting thing about the series 2 is that it comes standard with the new and very much improved GUI, but also hardware wise harbor the latest Realtek 1185 chipset, and that changes a thing or two as the performance issues we had noticed in 1080P content playback (with very high bit-rate) are now a thing of the past. That Realtek 1185 chipset has an increased clock frequency, 500 MHz coming from 400 MHz on the original version. And it makes all the difference.

Meanwhile, AC Ryan started to further improve on the PlayOn!HD as you'll spot a USB 3.0 slave port which you can use to quickly play back from or transfer files.

On the practical side of things, AC Ryan implemented an EZ-Drive slot for HDD insertion easily and securely, no tool required. You take out the 3.5" HDD and can just as easily insert one with a new or larger volume size.

Last but not least, the included media remote control design has been changed as well, into a more intuitive and smaller layout.

All in all pretty significant changes, let's have a peek at the product and see how well it performs.