AC Ryan Play On! HD hands-on

Last time I heard about AC Ryan was thru Calvin of PTB when he bought his unit in Singapore a couple of years ago. By May this year, we got word from the distributor that it’s now available in the Philippines and we got a review unit of the AC Ryan Play On! HD a couple of weeks ago.

The AC Ryan looks like your typical boxed media player — it feels a little bulky because the enclosure can be fitted with a 3.5″ hard drive of up to 2TB.

The company is based in Sweden Holland and it’s only been able to get a local distributor here in the Philippines in the last couple of month. AC Ryan boasts that they support the most number of formats and plethora of features among media players in the market (at least for their price category).

The test unit we got did not have an internal drive included so we just plugged in an external HDD in one of its 3 USB ports.

The unit will automatically detect all the media files in the attached storage and list them down per category in the player. That allows you to just go hit the play button — all the listed files will then be played one after the other (which is very user-friendly).

The essential ports are found at the back — Composite, HDMI and SPDIF — and you can play full HD 1080p movies as well (for the AC Ryan Play On! HD model). The two USB ports are found on the right side fo the box along with the card reader.

Full specs and features of the AC Ryan Play On! HD can be found here (just in case you want to look at the list of video/audio formats and other stuff):

The graphical UI of the player looks simple and straight-forward — you’re automatically forwarded to the media listing where you are given the list of recently added media files you play from the box. Been using it for a couple of weeks and haven’t bumped into any problems.

There’s a LAN port included so you can hook it up to the network and support for WiFi dongle via USB if you want to go wireless (sold separately). There’s also a BitTorrent client included in here if you want to download files directly into the device.

Suggested retail price are as follows:

AC Ryan Essential – Php5,300USD 90INR 7,656EUR 86CNY 658
AC Ryan Play On! HD – Php8,300USD 141INR 11,990EUR 135CNY 1,030

The AC Ryan line-up is one of the more affordable network media tanks around and will be gunning for the same market as Western Digital.