Using Playon for TV/Movies

[sburrw]

We use PlayOn to record movies and TV shows for later playback in the AS. I was wondering if other people use this service. It costs $2.50 per month (or $70 lifetime) and you can record anything you have access to, like HBO, Netflix, Amazon, Xfinity, PBS, all the networks. We recorded a bunch of movies and TV shows that we never got around to watching (like every episode of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones), put them of a small external hard drive, and then play them back on the TV using the USB input on our Roku. You'll need the free Media Player app for Roku, but that's it. We can use headphones in the Roku remote in case one person is sleeping. Find it at Playon.tv

[AWCHIEF]

Welcome, never heard of it. do you work for the company?

[sburrw]

No, but I can see how it would appear that way. It seems to solve my problems of not being able to stream content while on the road.

[Rich W]

Some of us use media players, rip DVDs or Blue Ray to an external drive. I create .iso images of DVDs, which is like a virtual DVD. The media player plays the image and it runs just like putting a DVD in a drive. You can FF, RW, pause, select a chapter, see the special features etc., just like having the DVD with you. I have 2 3TB drives with hundreds of movies and series on them. The Roku 3 I have won't play an .iso image, few will. I use a Brite-View player, plays every format I've run across so far.

[jtwind]

I thought Playon was a great idea. Personally I never got it to work right or consistantly. Not sure if it was my computer or what. Their line was always we no one else has ever had this issue. It locked up my PC many many times. They never were much help and I was beyond their money back period so I kept trying, both they and I gave up when their only plan was for me to sent them huge, huge files of data for them to sort through and figure out what was up. To their credit they finally gave in and refunded me. I think for hours of my time I managed to download two hours of a tv show successfully. It's a good idea and mine was probably an isolated case.

[sburrw]

They had some major upgrades this summer that make it a lot easier. It still takes 2 hours to download a 2-hour movie, but I just let it run for days until everything was copied.

[KJRitchie]

Does Playon have a deal with Netflix and Amazon? They are pretty protective about their content. I can't see them wanting someone to stream their content and convert to a file for watching later.

Kelvin

[sburrw]

You have to login to your Netflix, Amazon, etc. accounts with your user name and password within PlayOn, and I found this about the legal aspects:

PlayOn has long maintained that users are just exercising the same rights they had with VCRs. The fact that PlayOn wasn’t sued into oblivion after launching its first recording features four years ago seems to bear out that claim.
“The same statutes that protect the DVR and the VCR before it protect us”

[KJRitchie]

I use Macs and PlayOn is only PC.

Netflix announced downloadable content this week.

You still need a good internet connection to record this content. Must be realtime recording like a VCR/DVR vs just downloading a file. To watch a movie you have to wait 2 hours vs several minutes to download.

Kelvin

[wulfraat]

All 3 services I subscribe to (DIRECTV, Amazon, Netfllix) allow you to download and watch offline. No need for another service on my side.

[jtwind]

Play on does allow downloading to a pc and from there put it on a large thumbdrive or harddrive so you could stock up. The Netflix version just allows downloading to a device like a phone or tablet so you need a fairly large one.