We
knew it was coming, now the ASUS O!Play is official. The HDP-R1 HD Media Player supports HD video playback in a variety of codecs including MPEG1/2/4, H.264, VC-1, and RM/RMVB in a multitude of packages including .mp4, .mov, .avi, .divx, and .mkv just to name a few. FLAC and OGG audio? Yup, no problem. The box connects to your display over HDMI or composite A/V with an option for optical digital audio for multi-channel setups. Media can be slung off a single USB 2.0/eSATA combo port, second vanilla USB 2.0 jack, or streamed over fixed Ethernet if you prefer to keep your content on the other side of the house. Sorry, no 802.11n because, you know, everyone's home is wired with Cat 5 (riiiight). No price or release date given; but it would have to be cheap and soon for us to be even remotely interested.
posted Jun 3rd 2009 1:53AM
More codec support than my Xbox 360, but still I'll stick to using it as an Media Center extender.
My Xbox 360 is ALMOST good enough, but that lack of MKV support is killer. Yes, I know there are workarounds but they involve more "work" than "around".
If Xbox could play an 8 GB MKV I wouldn't need any other machine. Or hell even an 8 GB MP4 (cause i could just use xenonmkv to remux it without having to reencode)
OMG that thing is sexy.. but the HDX-1000 / H-110 do the same and have been here longer so biger fanbase..
Nice, but I don't see ISO support :-(
"won't likely get an O-face"
Until I stream some porn.
why is there never wireless streaming on these things?!
Main reason they don't include wireless is because it's often not quick enough to keep up with HD video.
I only need 2 formats (.iso and .flac), 2 output connections (hdmi and optical audio) and 2 network connections (cat5 and wifi g).
Why is it so hard for the manufacturers to figure out the simple, cheap box?
Because they need to sell more than one. The more options they provide the larger the target audience. By having all the options in one device opposed to multiple models they only need to have one assembly line. Not to mention the fact more than a few of us move our devices room to room or take them with us on vacation or over to a friends for a party where the place we're going may not have HD and having the option is nice.
But it more or less does or can...
It can't read the ISOs, but it will read the contents of the ISO just fine; just extract the ISO (WinRAR can do it) and it'll play the VOB files happily.
The lack of wireless is a bummer, but you can build/buy a wireless bridge for $30-40 USD.
Other than that, it meets all other the requirements you listed.
As no-one has a cat5 wired house, this thing offers very little over the WD HD TV which is a product I have been very very happy with over the past 5/6 months.
You beat me to it. My dad uses the heck out of his, and he is a total luddite. It doesn't stream, but unless your house is already wired, or you plan on shelling out another hundred bucks for a wireless N gateway, neither will this thing.
I have a Cat-6 wired house. Went in the attic one summer and sweat my a$$ off but every room has a drop. But thanks for speaking for everyone...
@timdickinson - speak for yourself. i've been wiring new houses for home builders since 2001. i currently live in a house where i have several runs of cat6 to all different rooms.
i've seen the WD HD TV, and definitely looks interesting, but without built in network its nearly useless. i've got TVs in the basement, main floor and in the bedroom. all media stays on a computer and gets streamed. what would i do with the WD? consistently make copies of my media so every tv can have its own copy?
My sisters last two hoouses were all wired. She lived in Florida and they were all newer houses. The last one had about three hookups around the kitchen. Loved it!
What Maestro said.
Wired my house to a couple of month's back, and couldn't be happier. My N Router was not able to keep a solid streaming connection, and this is with a TV that was one room away from the router.
I do. After a year of wi-fi that never quite worked well enough, and a short waste-of-time with power-line networking (don't get me started), I finally gave up and went crawling around under the house with a spool of CAT5. Now I get no more complaints from the kids when X-box live gets jittery. No more pixelation on HD streams. No more "you are not connected to the internet" error messages on my PC. No more WEP, WAP crap. Do yourself a favor and run the wire. It's cheap and it's bullet-proof.
Looks Like connected Blu-ray Players for $300 dollars and above are already a thing of the past , with these new slick digital media players, that cost less than a ticket to Disneyland.
Lo and Behold the Big Japanese CE producers have still not heard of the Free container MKV, and they properly never will until its too late for them,
will it be like Western Digital's and scans the entire external every single time i add something new to the HD?
If it's more than $120 (WDTV + USB Ethernet Adapter) then it's not worth it.
do you get wireless streaming to wd tv when you use a usb adapter?
If it is more than USD139 (Egreat EG-M34A - Low priced popcorn clone) then it's not worth it. Price currently http://www.egreathd.com/
O!Not again
We need a face-off between this and a Popcorn hour.
I have a popcorn hour. Think it was about 200 bucks...plays anything I can throw at. Was well worth the money. Not sure what the author considers "cheap" but at the end of the article implies that such a device isn't worth the price. Couldn't be more wrong.
The Popcorn Hour has one huge shortcoming; extremely limited subtitle (SSA/ASS) support. The developers basically admitted that it was a hack to just parse out the timecodes and the first line of text associated with that timecode. Zero support for colour, position, movement, fonts, anything else. It doesn't even support more than one line of text at a timecode, so translation notes or non-autowrapped dialog won't work.
So for people who enjoy anime, the key question is how advanced the Asus devices' claimed SSA support is. If it's a complete implementation, this thing will blow the Popcorn Hour out of the water.
So it is basically a Western Digital TV with an ethernet port? Interesting....
Between the higher cost of N networking and the reliability of wired cat5 or cat6 everyone should just hire someone to do the wired jacks. I hired a phone installer to do every room of my house for less than $100 per drop including wire and wall plates. The only wireless I use anymore is for true portable devices.
My brite-view CinemaCube was only $84.99 after $5 coupon on Amazon. It's a networkable HD media player + BitTorrent downloader. It plays almost everything - including RM, RMVB and MKV. AND it download torrents when I'm sleeping - never have to leave the computer on all night any more! :)
"brite-view CinemaCube"... but that's NOT a Full HD player, only 720p (just googled it).
I got my Playon!HD http://www.playonhd.com a couple of weeks ago. For me there's no reason to wait for Asus since I want one with an internal hard disk. This Asus model did make me start my search again. I've now got a 1TB built-in and it plays perfectly for me - ISOs, MKVs, TS, M2TS etc. The Playon!HD is playing more files (some difficult MKV) than my friend's popcornhour. Also boots up faster, loads photos (much) faster. I think the current bunch of Sigma+NMT solution is just getting a bit old. Technology does age faster than dogs. I'm having a good time teasing my friend hehe.