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Why I'm contemplating asking for a refund

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I bought PlayOn a few days ago, and so far I have been very disapointed. Here's why:

1) Off-Peak queue did not trigger last night, did the night before tho. So it's unreliable.

2) No way to remove the "This video has been recorded by ..." screen at the be beginning, or the loading part at the beginning.

3) I wanted to use PlayOn because my connection is slow and metered so it allow me to plan my download better. But PlayOn is too dumb to know when the stream is buffering and just stupidly record the output, not the data stream. Basically it's like video recording your own screen with Screen Recorder software, which a lot are free BTW.

4) The PlayOn server seems to have hard time to start up by itself, I always have to click "start" after starting PlayOn, could be linked to issue #1. Point is that out of the box, it's unreliable.

5) Quality settings are vague. HD, high, medium, low: What about putting resolutions in the drop down instead of subjective terms ? And HD is only 720, now 1080, which seems to confuse a lot of people online when I searched on the topic.

6) Browsing is painful. Not only slow, but also very uninformative.

7) Sounds like most people who use PlayOn expect to do one simple thing: record shows from Netflix or other services. Then we get that bloated software. Basically no one cares about the "free" portion of it. And the useful portion isn't that straight forward.

8) When you Off-Peak queue gets too big, it doesn't scroll so you can't access (re-order or re-queue) the items that are too low in the list.

9) When I installed PlayOn, it added some kind of sound processing driver/device and had it set as the default sound device for Windows 10. Well sure enough my sound completely stopped working until I figure what play on had done to my sound setup. As soon as put my TV back as the default sound device, my sound worked fine again AND PlayOn was still able to record sounds without problem.

 

So all in all, I can't say that I am impressed.

Hopefully I remained constructive through my feedback so it allow the software to improved as I would love to have a decent stream recorder that allow me to watch legally content that I pay for but that my slow internet connection (remote location) does not allow me to enjoy "live".

 

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    Tom Huber

    Item 1 - report it as a problem. To do so, click on the ? next to the asterisk iin the lower right corner of the Playon screen.

    Item 2 - Yes there is, but not with PlayOn. This is a requirement of the terms of service, but the opening and closing "rights" banner can be removed.

    Item 3 - With slow connections, do not use the PC version of PlayOn. There is a mobile application that records the shows elsewhere that, when finished, can be downloaded to your PC. I use this quite often. It is a premium feature and there is a per-show cost, but it is ideal for slow connections.

    Item 4 - I've reported this as a problem. It appeared with the latest version and likely will be addressed within a few days.

    Item 5 - The quality is dependent upon speed and should be coordinated with what speed your system can attain. Match quality and speed. Keep in mind that the higher quality you select, the higher the chance of having an inconsistent video playback. Recording with your PC is very dependent on the reason you wanted to use PlayOn to begin with. The connection speed is just too slow and at the least, PlayOn offers a mobile application that gets around the problem.

    On the issue of resolution, if you want higher resolution, you'll have to buy the Blu-Ray discs. As it is the 720 offers good playback, even on HD screens. Ours is 720 and there is little difference between a show recorded at 720 and one at 1080 lines. Added: Our playback is 1080 for a 1080 HD 42" television. I can see some difference, but not much.

    Item 6 - With a slow connection, it is going to be. Try using IMDB with a slow connection speed. You are searching very large channel databases.

    Item 7 - I use PlayOn to record a wide variety of show from several different Channels. The only time I use Netflix is when one of the Netflix-produced shows is not available on DVD. PlayOn gives me the option of recording from Amazon and I have Prime Membership, have purchased a number of seasons of shows that are not available on DVD or elsewhere, and store the shows on an array of six 5TB drives that is controlled by an HD TV Live box..

    Item 8 - I do not use off-peak hours and see no benefit in it. If you had a cable connection, then you'll want to use it. As it is, your slow connection speed does not benefit from off-peak, when high-speed connections are most heavily used.

    Item 9 - This can be easily resolved by selecting the default driver. I suspect that others have reported the problem, but I haven't because my recording PC does not have speakers.

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