It does have its share of issues, but it does most things very well better than most. The average price for the mini 2 is around £80 (~$130 USD), and at that price-range, I’d consider it worth it. In the UK and other European countries, however, there are a plethora of stores available. There’s one single retailer listed on AC Ryan’s website, but it doesn’t carry the latest versions. If I had to harp on just one more issue, it’s that acquiring any AC Ryan media player from inside the US or Canada is near impossible. I am hopeful that most of the issues I mentioned are tackled in a future firmware update, but given this product has been available for months, it’s a little disheartening to see that some problems have persisted up to this point. In taking a look at the AC Ryan forums, there are multiple topics I’ve seen from others who’ve complained about some lacking features that would do well to be there, and in the case of the networking indexes, you can look at one particular thread to see how it’s accomplished.
Though I can’t recollect them all at this point, there were multiple occasions where I was left stumped, where even the manual didn’t clear things up for me, but rather a Google search. Had I been presented with an error, I wouldn’t have had to reference the manual to get a hint of what I was overlooking. Before I realized that the device was incapable of indexing network shares, I tried entering the Movies, Music and Photos libraries, but nothing would happen. The lack of error messages or general lack of information was also a problem. There do exist hacks to fix the problem (which I have not tested), but that’s overkill for a device that’s meant to make difficult things simple. For a device that excels at streaming, this is a nonsensical problem. The biggest problem I have is that the device will not index network shares and add those to the various libraries. There were multiple times when using the device that I would ask myself ‘why?’, because if not for a small handful of oddities, this could well be an outstanding, or near-perfect device. While it improves upon the original in an incredible way, it still has some niggles that are borderline frustrating – but for me, its pros heavily outweigh the cons. That’s despite some of the problems the Playon!HD Mini 2 has. If I were in personal need of such a device, this is the one I’d choose. So much so, that it’s without question the best one I’ve ever taken a look at. That doesn’t mean that it’s not fantastic, though, and in fact, it is. To date, I haven’t found what I’d consider to be a “perfect” set-top media player, and nor does the Playon!HD Mini 2 fill that void.