![]() ![]() I bought the lifetime PlayOn back in 2015, and while it never worked 100% it worked well enough, if a recording failed it would usually record again by restarting it. I am drifting back to PlayOn Cloud for reliability reasons.I get this feeling too, I think they are focusing most of their resources on their new cloud service and just don't have enough to keep the desktop service working. So the question is, do you pay 10-20c for each recording and get reliable results, or pay an annual fee for unlimited recording that will produce results based mostly on the power of your computer and whether or not you are using it at the same time you are recording. If I moved recorded content out of PlayOn's specified directories and restarted the program, the problem seemed to go away for awhile. There have been multiple instances when running Home where I could not open file directories, or even get a response from the Windows 10 Start button while it was running. The Home service is inelegantly designed, buggy, and occasionally starts eating resources. Overall, PlayOn Cloud is a much more reliable service and produces better, more even results. If a 60 minute TV show shows twice in listings, once at 58 minutes and the other at 52 minutes, the longer one is probably loaded up with ads, so record the other one. ![]() When it comes to duplicate search results (showing ad-supported and ad-free content) the only workaround I have found is to pay close attention to reported lengths of content. Amazon's hierarchical menu display via PlayOn Home is buggy and often returns no results as you dig down through menus for different services you subscribe to through Amazon Prime (ie. There is no easy way to distinguish where that content is coming from when using the search box on Home. Peacock also occasionally logs you out behind the scenes apparently.Īmazon Channels is problematic with Home because of the presence of services like imdb video, which often has ad-supported content in its library on Amazon Prime that duplicates content found on other services. I've found most of the time seeing a whole slew of failed recordings in your list means the streaming service you used stopped allowing recordings because you were logged out or at least not able to access the content servers and won't even show a content list until you log out and log back in again using the PlayOn control panel. I don't notice this from the Cloud service.įailed recordings and dropping out of a stream early are much more common with Home than Cloud. These typically show up as screen freezes that suddenly speed forward to catch-up, buffering pauses, short bursts of black screen, and in a few instances with HBO Max, PlayOn recording 15 seconds of a frozen screen that restarted playback only to freeze again every few minutes. If you task your computer a lot, such as moving files around on your network or doing any CPU-intensive things, you risk a lot of glitches in your recordings. Netflix and Amazon seem to handle this more elegantly and less intrusively. HBO Max, for example, briefly stutters during the first 5 seconds of playback as it switches to a higher bitrate. Some observations specific to Home: Some services are better than others at dynamically adjusting video streaming quality than others. On a less capable machine, you won't be able to reasonably record at a higher quality, and even on a decent machine, if you are doing a lot on your computer while recording, glitches start to turn up in your recordings that were never an issue with Cloud. What I forgot is that the quality of PlayOn Home is really dependent on you having a very capable computer that you can avoid using very much while PlayOn is recording. PlayOn Home looked at first glance like a way to avoid incurring the per-recording fees that Cloud charges, and could be a way to grab shows that were of minor interest, but not worth paying 10c on up for each one. ![]() I have been an enthusiastic user of PlayOn Cloud for a few years now and have probably managed over 2,000 recordings through that service, with about a 1-2% failure rate where something went wrong or the recording suffered some sort of issue. ![]()
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