As Windows Home Server is touted as a media storage device, we always keep our eyes open for new devices and reviews for said devices. While the Asus O!Play HDP-R1 may not be brand new, forum member GaPony has gotten his hand on one and written a nice post reviewing the device.
I just received the O!Play from newegg today and while I haven’t spent a lot of time with it, I can say I’m pretty impressed.
Connecting to the network literally took about 2 seconds. I plugged in the cable, clicked the option for automatic DHCP IP and that, was that. I will most likely go back and manually assign a different IP Address at a later time, but there’s no specific need to do so.
Connecting to the WHS server took about 2 minutes because I have a hard time navigating those stupid little on-screen keyboards, but once I hit the Enter button, it was in like Flint.
The main menu is really quite cool, but hides the stark navigation system below. While it doesn’t have the most elegant folder navigation I’ve seen, its quite easy… much like navigating folders in Windows. I’ve tried playing .vob, .mpg, mkv, wmv, avi, .divx, files and the all played without a hitch. When playing the video_ts.ifo files from a ripped folder, the menu works initially, but I don’t see a way to call the menu back up once the movie starts. (I might need to read the manual) It plays DVD .iso files and even Blu-Ray .iso files, which frankly surprised me a little. I couldn’t find any .mov files laying around…. sorry.
Moving on, it can FF up to 32x and does it very smoothly. It can skip forward in user defined segments of 5/10/15/20/30 time slices… again pretty smoothly. Again, its not as elegant as it could be, but its as close to chapter support that I’ve seen on any device.
I was a little apprehensive about upgrading the stock 1.07 firmware to the current 1.17 firmware, but it was as easy as Asus could make it. Just copy the firmware patch onto a formatted thumbdrive, stick it in the USB slot, hit the update option and about 3 minutes later, you’re back up running.
Plugging in an external USB or eSATA HD is a piece of cake. Plug it in, turn it on, give it a minute to read the drive, and its ready to go.
This device doesn’t offer thumbnail navigation for movies… just preview mode or list mode, but its snappy and works well (and saves me time not having to round up thumbnail images). This device is strictly an intranet device, which helps keep things simple. You can us the UPnP to access a server program like PlayOn for Hulu and other stuff, but its really too slow to be useful. On the other hand, streaming your movies from PS3MediaServer work quite well, just not as elegantly as the PS3 does it, and quite frankly there’s no need. This device doesn’t require the services of a PS3MediaPlayer, TVersity, Twonky, or other streaming server because it handles everyting natively… to include DTS and DTS-MA, so far as I can tell at this early stage.
If you’re looking for a straight forward, no frills, easy to use, media player, this might just be the one. Whether connecting to a 30TB server or to a 150GB external HDD, or anything in between, its has been quite functional. The sound and picture quality has been excellant in my testing of from 480p DVDs to 1080p Blu-Ray rips.
At $87.99 (with free shipping) from newegg.com, it may just be too good to pass up. I would strongly recommend it to my friends looking to play there movies from hard drives, or from their PCs over a LAN.
Check out the original forum thread here.
