The Asus O!Play HDP-R1 is a funky little device. It doesn’t do all that much, yet it’s also not that expensive. It’s a media player and streamer which I picked up months ago for $100; it supports HDMI with multi-channel audio output, USB and eSATA drives, as well as network connectivity via a 100MB LAN network port.
Asus has been pushing out rather tame firmware updates along the way, most of which haven’t added all that much to the table. However, in the past week or so, they have released version 1.21 of their firmware which seems to make it a tad more attractive and usable.
ID3 tags still do not come up properly; instead of the proper English contents, seemingly random Chinese and other special characters fill the fields. Any sort of auto-indexing is thereby crushed in terms of practical use; though it does index your collection anyway.
Codec support in 1.21 is still strong. It is probably in the act of saying that a bug is squashed that I will start to see it come up again: though it seems some odd playback problem whereby MP3s would start to stutter is now under control.
More importantly, my network shares which come up via my Apple Airport Extreme are now finally findable via the built-in network utility. Previously, in order to get the network shares to mount properly, I had to resort to the command line on my laptop and do the following:
telnet <Asus box IP>
# when prompted for a login, type "root"
mkdir /tmp/ramfs/volumes/<mount_point>
mount -t cifs -o username='guest',password='' //<server ip>/<share> /tmp/ramfs/volumes/<mount_point>
Via the above sequence, the HDP-R1 would gladly show the provided network share as a “local storage” volume. Upon updating to firmware 1.21, however, I now see the same share in the “Network Shortcuts” section of the content browsers. I’m not sure if it was necessary to have first connected the share in the above way in order for it to appear in the list of shortcuts; though if you’re dedicated enough then a single try at this process isn’t so bad.
The only high-definition content I have, currently, is the Nine Inch Nails 1080p, 5.1 MKV file for “THIS ONE IS ON US“. At 9GB for two hours of footage, it’s a rather large file. The Asus box played it perfectly, streaming the raw surround sound to my receiver without error, over the 100MB LAN network. That, to me, is rather impressive, and I have a feeling I’m going to get a lot more great use out of the device before its day is done.
UPDATE: After playing with the network connection as described above, I found that at some point the network connection no longer worked. After snooping around a bit, I found that this was not a problem with the Asus box, exactly: the Airport Extreme file server was not responding via CIFS (Windows file sharing), even though it continued to share files without fault via AFP (how it shares to OS X machines). I restarted the Airport Extreme, and then everything was back to normal.