Playon TV, Playlater and Plugins

[DB44]

Playon and Playlater have been mentioned in these forums in passing in the past. I've been playing around with it for some time, and am finding it quite useful. For more information visit . Basically it acts as a upnp media server offering a wide variety of online streaming services. So, for instance, if you were using, say, Boxee, which is ever promising Hulu access but has so far not delivered, you can access Hulu from your Boxee via the Playon server. It is also very useful in the case of network enabled TV's, as it brings a larger variety of services to them. I haven't actually tried it from the WD TV Live as yet but would be quite surprised if it did not work.

An interesting associated product is Play Later, which allows recording of any of the streams accessible to Playon. The recording interface is too basic in my view to really call it a web DVR. Playlater simply brings up the program guide and you can select to queue for recording. Your recording will be accessible to all your other devices through playon in the same way as direct streaming. It will, in keeping with the on demand nature of most of the streaming services, record only one program at a time. Others are queued to commence on the completion of the first. This interface design is fine for most things, but when streaming live tv content via plugins, is far from flexible. In this case you have no program guide and if you do choose to record in this way your sole option is to record 4 hours of the same channel.

The Plugins are an excellent feature. Software is available which apparently makes it easy to create your own plugins, and to share them or even sell them online. There are a number of plugin sites, but a look at is well worth while. For instance, I'm currently playing with Superuservox Live TV and CouchTuner, both from this page. Quality of course can vary from excellent to appalling. In the case of the Live TV availability can change. It seems plugins work mainly by finding currently available streams.

Well worth a look.