Playon!HD 2 Media Player - Inside

Inside the HD 2 we find a main PCB which is significantly smaller than the chassis and close to the centre is the Realtek chipset which controls the player. This processor, branded RTD1185DD, sits alongside on-board memory which on our sample was a Nanya NT5TU64M16GG-AC DDR2. Also present is the RTL8211D GB LAN controller and as with the Mini 2 we reviewed last week there is a Hynix NAND Flash chip branded HY27UF084G2B which stores out GUI/OS for the device.

The final significant chip in the HD 2 is a JMS551 USB 3.0 to SATA bridge controller.

Also worth noting is that the system also includes a mini-PCIe slot which means we could insert a Wi-Fi card, or at least AC Ryan can offer models with Wi-Fi built in.


Two other aspects of note are the smaller PCB which sits at the front of the unit providing its IR and power features on the external surface and that at the back of the unit is a single cooling fan which runs near silent at all times.

Finally, before we look at the device in use, here are a list of the detailed specifications and format support:

A/V Out	HDMI 1.3 interface up to 1080p Composite Audio / Video Y/ Pb / Pr Video SPDIF coaxial (digital audio) SPDIF Optical TOSLink (digital audio)
Storage Supported	Internal hard disk drive External USB mass storage devices (hard drives, flash drives) Media Cards USB sticks and other USB mass storage devices
BUILT-IN Storage Supported	EZ-Drive slot - 3.5" SATA/SATA2 HDD up to 2TB 2.5" HDD support via adaptor frame
Media Cards Supported	SD, SDHC (SD High Capacity), MMC, MS, MSPro
USB Supported	USB 3.0 and 2.0 Interfaces Add ports with USB hubs, USB card readers 2x USB 2.0 (USB-A) 1x USB 3.0 Slave Port (USB-B)
External File System Supported	FAT, FAT32, NTFS, EXT3, HFS+
Network - Wired	Gigabit
Network - Wireless (Optional)	Wireless WLAN 802.11b/g/n 300Mbps via USB WLAN adaptor (optional, not incl.) Supports WLAN security WEP, WPA Supports WLAN Peer-to-Peer (connects wireless without router)
Network - Wireless Bult-In (selected models only)	Wireless-N via a PCI-e port with dual antenna
Video Formats Supported	AVI / MKV / TS / TP / TRP / M2TS / MPG / MP4 / MOV / M4V / VOB / ISO / DVD-ISO / IFO / DAT / WMV / ASF / RM / RMVB / / BD-ISO FLV resolution up to 720p / 1080i / 1080p
Video Codecs Supported	MPEG-1 / MPEG-2 / MPEG-4 SP/ASP/AVC (H.264 | x264) / XviD / DivX / WMV9 (VC-1) / RealVideo 8/9/10 (up to 720P)
Video Output Supported	PAL / NTSC / 480p / 576p / 720p / 1080i 50Hz / 1080i 60Hz / 1080p 50Hz / 1080p 60Hz / 1080p 24FPS
Audio Formats Supported	MP3 / MP2 / WMA / AAC / FLAC / WAV / OGG Vorbis / PCM / LPCM / MS-ADPCM / LC-AAC / HE-AAC / COOK / RA-Lossless
Audio Output Supported	Stereo Dolby Digital AC3 5.1 (passthrough & downmix to stereo) Dolby Digital Plus 7.1 (passthrough) Dolby TrueHD 7.1 (passthrough & downmix to stereo) DTS Digital Surround 5.1 (passthrough & downmix to stereo) AAC 7.1 (passthrough & downmix to stereo) FLAC
Image Formats Supported	JPEG, HD JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIF, PNG
Subtitles Format Supported	SRT, SMI, SSA, IDX/SUB, SUB
Character Sets Supported (Needed for Subtitles)	Unicode (UTF8), BIG5 (Traditional Chinese), Western, Turkish, Central European, Greek, Cyrillic, SE European, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Thai
Cooling	40mm Low-Noise Fan (for HDD Cooling)