Asus O!Play HD 1080p HDP-R1 Live Internet Media Streamer

Great little box
I have been looking for a little box to play all my DVD & Bluray rips for a while as I was getting fed up of having so many discs in my lounge and I can keep the originals safely away from small children and sticky fingers! I have been slowly copying them onto a NAS drive connected to a wired ethernet network. When I first got the Asus O!Play, I updated the firmware to the latest 1.21P version by simply downloading the file to a USB pendrive and inserting it into the USB slot on the O!Play. The firmware updated easily. Set-up was minimal, I set my timezone to GMT and gave the box a static IP on my network and that's it. I can play straight DVD rips as Video-TS folders and Bluray rips as m2ts files. The picture quality is excellent and with a wired network I have had no problems with network speed. The resume playback feature is great if I get disturbed half way through a film and the menu system works quickly.

I have a MythTV box set-up as well and the O!Play finds its uPNP...

Asus O!Play HD 1080p HDP-R1 Live Internet Media Streamer

Almost perfect
I'd love to be able to give this 5 stars since it has some great features and the price is very good. However, a few things let it down. First the good stuff. This is a very smart little box that looks very good. It delivers true 1080p resolution and HD content does look very good. Connect up pretty much any USB device (or eSATA) and it will recognise it straight away. It can handle all sorts of disk formats and so one is not limited to FAT32. It will also recognise just about any format of video, photo or music. Very impressive. Even loads up DVD iso images and displays the DVD menu allowing you to use it just like a real DVD (which you can also do if you connect a DVD drive to the unit - so the instructions say, but I have not tried that). Content on devices attached directly to the O Play is handled very well. Hence, as a basic media player, it is very capable. However, there are cheaper units that will do pretty much the same thing. What sets the O play apart from them is that it...

Asus O!Play HD 1080p HDP-R1 Live Internet Media Streamer

BUY IT, CONNECT IT AND WATCH IT, SIMPLE AS THAT
I bought this box of tricks two weeks ago (November 2010) and it's got to be
one of the best bits of kit I've bought in years, but i can't understand
why other people are having problems with it, i took it out of the box
plugged the power lead in, plugged the HDMI lead in, plugged the network cable in
and connected an external hard drive then turned it on.

The setup menu came up so i set the screen size and all the other options
then searched the hard drive for Movies Photos And Music all played as normal.

Then i plugged a Sandisk cruzer 16GB stick in the USB slot containing a DivX movie
and a few other photos and music files and everything just worked.

DVD Menus worked as well, the only videos i found that wouldn't play had the wmv file extension,
which could be converted to another format if necessary

I mainly use Linux (Kubuntu 10.4 64 bit) it had no problems finding stuff in my shared folders
via...

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