Asus hd media player review

Play HDP-R1 are somewhat underwhelming. Added to this, the remote looks distinctly cheap and toy-like, with its overly curved profile and rubber buttons. On a more positive note, the unit feels quite sturdy and, once hidden away amongst all your other AV gear, its looks are hardly going to be of great concern.

Unlike devices such as the Popcorn Hour A and A. Ryan Playon! Instead you playback your media either from a USB stick or over the network connection. Also on the back are sockets for stereo analogue audio, composite video, optical digital audio, HDMI, and of course power.

The lack of component video output may be of concern to those with older TVs but we can forgive Asus for this as HDMI is just so ubiquitous nowadays. Setup is as simple as it gets. You just connect your choice of video and audio connection to your TV, plug in the power adapter, and press the power button on your remote and away you go. These you can then browse for your multimedia files. Back to the menu system and there are three basic routes to your media; photos, music, and videos.

When files are sorted into Photos, Music, and Videos, unrelated file types are simply hidden from view so if you have a folder containing multiple file types and browse it through Videos it will only show video files; through Music, only music files, etc. However, assuming you keep your files reasonably organised it is a simple and intuitive system to get around, which is more than can be said of some seemingly more sophisticated interfaces on other devices.

This makes it possible to swap and share files without the need to start up a computer. When browsing video and photo files, previews appear in the right panel, which is quite useful though we would prefer a proper thumbnail view instead. Also, this preview mode suffers in the same way that the Seagate FreeAgent Theater did: you must wait until the preview has finished loading until you can actually tell the player to play it.

Other features include the ability to zoom up to x16 into video and photos and pan around them. Repeat and shuffle functions are available for music, and like the other features just mentioned, there are dedicated buttons on the remote to control this. Indeed, the clear plastic shuffle button is the most prominent button on the whole remote.

All the major video file formats are supported including mkv and rmvb and resolutions of up to p are all playable. Playback is smooth and loading times are near instantaneous. Likewise music and image format support is also up there with the best for a full list, see the next page.

The Asus O! However, if all you want is a cheap media player for browsing your network folders and playing just about any file you throw at it then we have no problem recommending the HDP-R1.

Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. Play does support, they've kind of got a point. On the audio side the O! That's a pretty extensive list that should keep all but the most finicky of consumers happy especially as it'll output at up to p resolution, dependent of course on the original source file.

Actual connectivity on the O! Play isn't particularly extensive, but then boxes this size don't typically have a lot of space for connections. Where the O! Play's connectivity does stand out in is where you get files from. There's a USB port on the side, and it'll read from both flash and suitably powered mechanical hard-disk drives.

It's also got an eSATA port on the same side if you want to push serious high quality material as fast as possible out. The one feature you won't find on the O! Play is any kind of integrated wireless. You could if you had to get around that with a wireless bridge. OK, so the O! Play has lots of mooted file compatibility in its corner.

But media streamers are all pretty much the same, right? Simple little playback boxes with generally awful or inconsistent and slow GUIs.

Except, as we discovered, the O! Play, which sports a slick, quick and easy to understand interface for choosing your media type and where you want to play it back from. A rotating circular interface first picks your media type, and then you pick from any connected source, or from your home network if connected. From that point the GUI gets a little less visually exciting, but that's largely because it dedicates a large quantity of the screen to file previews, which play automatically on the right-hand side of the screen.

One odd little omission with the O! Play's file support is that it doesn't read ID3 file tags at all. If your music library doesn't have obvious actual file names, you might find this a bit of a problem. That aside though, the O! Play handled every file we threw at it with ease. The remote worked well from a variety of angles, and its large but not inconveniently so size meant it wasn't easily lost. It spotted all of our network shares with a minimum of fuss, and connecting via Homeplug compliant Ethernet over power devices we could simply stream all types of content to a connected screen.

When connected via the LAN, you'll periodically get a network speed update, although only in the network menus and not during playback. It's a nice little touch that makes it pretty clear if your current network connections really are up to scratch for playing back that HD content, or if you'd be better off just sticking to those low-resolution downloaded YouTube files instead.

So far so good, but we did hit one critical problem with the O! No matter what we tried, the O!