The other day I picked up an Asus O!Play HDP-R1; and if that isn’t a mouthful of a product name I’m not sure what is. I bought it from Newegg, who currently sells it for $100, tossing in a free HDMI cable. Thus far I’ve found it a pretty great deal, even if it isn’t the most user friendly or feature-full device out there. The spare HDMI cable wasn’t too crazy a deal since you can get just about any kind of cable on the cheap from monoprice.com.. but I was low on cables anyway.
The main competitor to the Asus device is the Western Digital WD TV, which has been around a while. WD recently launched a second “Live” version with improved network connectivity and YouTube support. Why anything is so much more appealing because of YouTube support is beyond me, but that’s another issue for another day. I personally went with the Asus version because as a company they generally seem to have rather open systems, and it tends to encourage tweaking with their hardware more than usual. From what I understand this particular Western Digital TV line follows in the same vein of being open and hackable.. but the O!Play won out for adding in a eSATA port and being a bit cheaper.
The graphical interface on the O!Play are not all that fancy, and I’ve had a bit of trouble with network sharing from my Apple Airport Extreme.. though I’m blaming the latter more on the Airport than the Asus device. I was eventually able to mount the share by logging into the Asus box via telnet and then running a mount command. It’s a bit absurd that a piece of consumer hardware would require something that low level, but from my perspective it’s also sort of awesome that I got it working with what is rather logical from my point of view. At the end of the day, as long as it works and it’s consistent, I’m happy.
Potentially, future revisions of firmware will tighten up certain aspects of the device, and, hopefully, third parties may get in the mix to add a thing or two. As it stands out of the box, however, it seems like it will work quite well in providing what I need, at a price I would not have dreamed possible only a couple years ago.
How’s the MKV support? 720p and better
Using my 360 to stream XviD off my shares, and it’s a good enough solution since 99% of my stuff is in that format anyway. Still, $100 for that last 1% isn’t THAT bad of a deal.
So it does understand the MKV container. I don’t have anything in 720p or higher, though I have a DVD here from which I encoded a section w/ both XVID and H.264. It played both without a hitch. Theora failed, sadly, though I’m not sure how popular Theora actually is. Hopefully it will be added by third parties in the future.
The player did, however, take the AC3 audio, which transmitted over HDMI to my receiver, apparently bitstreaming (anyway, not PCM), the result of which was that I had proper surround sound.