Asus O!Play HD Media Player

The Asus O!Play HD Media Player (model number HDP-R1/2A) enters a marketspace that has sprouted quite recently. It is targeted at those who’d like to be able to play media files of just about any format, and get the output on a large-screen HDTV and surround sound system. One option for this audience was to take the trouble of building a HTPC (Home Theatre PC) themselves and connect it to the TV and speakers in the living room. This class of media players offer an easier option of buying a pre-built machine that does most of the job. As a bonus, their size and price are both usually far lesser than a HTPC. The inability to play DVD discs is a definite downside, perhaps offset by the market segment that this class of media players target. Also, unlike a HTPC these media players cannot record your TV shows for viewing later.

The HDP-R1 is a media player of the approximate size of other similar products (an example would be the WDTV HD, but not as small as the Amkette FlashTV). Think of the dimensions of the Apple Mac Mini, but just a bit more rectangular in shape. Housed in a black and glossy casing, there are two LED indicators at the front that light up when power and a storage device are connected, respectively. The output connectors are all at the back, with jacks for Analog audio/video, Digital audio (SP/DIF) and a HDMI port. Also at the back are the power jack and a 100Mbps Ethernet port. Wait… Ethernet port? Yes this device can access data over a LAN and play media directly from other devices (desktop PC/laptop/NAS box, etc) connected to the same network. Storage devices that use a USB 2.0 or a fast eSATA port can connect to the media player. Thankfully, almost every common file-system and media file-format is supported for playback, so you don’t need to think twice about either. For more details of supported media formats, see the “Specifications” tab of this review.

A battery-operated remote is provided to control the media player. The labelling of buttons on the remote is not too obvious (with some exceptions like the volume +/- buttons), so the purpose of each button takes some getting used to. The on-screen interface is not the most intuitive to navigate, but it looks quite pretty and within a few minutes you’ll feel right at home. Upon switching on, the main items seen on the screen are Photos, Music, Movies, and Setup. You can also copy files between devices, but it did not work with the NTFS-formatted pendrive we used. The file manager uses a two-pane view, one for navigation through folders and another on the right-hand for file-previews. This preview functionality can be annoying though – scrolling through a list of movies/songs slows down as each file starts playing automatically, but it is useful if you aren’t scrolling through hundreds of files and really do want to preview content. The “Setup” menu allows for changing options such as the output video device (TV or monitor for instance) and the aspect ratio to use.

Now we proceed to the actual media performance we saw. Viewing photos was good – navigating through photo folders was quick, photos were scaled to fit the screen and could be zoomed into for a better view, speed of photo slideshows was controllable, and file details could be displayed on demand. Browsing through stored music was smooth, particularly since chosen files can play in the background while you get back to navigating folders to pick your next song. If you have a number of audio files in a folder and played one, they will all be played in sequence automatically. Detailed file information in the audio preview pane is restricted only to MP3 files with ID3 tags. Using the Forward/Rewind buttons on the remote, it is possible to speedup playback upto 32x (32 times the normal speed) for all supported formats of audio or video. Movie playback was surprisingly good. Playing bog-standard video files (of the DVD quality, or of digital download quality) that are quite low-resolution by themselves, was very acceptable with the way they were upscaled to 1080p resolution. Movies known as DVD-rips (low file-size backups of DVDs you own) that used binary SUB or text-based SRT files to display sub-titles were particularly appealing. Firstly the video was upscaled to 1080p resolution, secondly the sub-titles were rendered so crisply on-screen that they seemed to have been anti-aliased. Movies encoded in the MKV format at a resolution of 720p with 5.1 channel surround sound, had no problems playing without jerks or artefacts.

We did see major artefacts and blotchy video while playing high-bitrate 1080p (Full High-Definition) video. Also, not all FLAC audio or FLV video files managed to play, despite being supported. Those who’d like to access their memory card through this device, would have to get themselves a USB adapter. There is no internal storage, so whatever you play has to come from some external source, whether it be a hard disk, pendrive or network shares. If we had to dredge through this product for further shortcomings, it would probably be the lack of support for wireless networks, despite supporting wired networks. For those who want wireless access, Asus does offer a product called the "O!Play Air" but that product misses out on some functionality provided by the HDP-R1.

Bottom Line

You can connect this to your TV and settle for some quality multimedia time, secure in the knowledge that you can throw almost any file at it for playback. It is priced low enough to appeal to the target audience. But remember that it is not positioned as a DVD Player replacement (DVD Players are priced at less than half the price, and do not support as many media formats as this one).