Legit Reviews

ASUS O!Play Air HDP-R3 Media Player Review

The ASUS O!Play HDP-R3 Network Media Player has been designed to make your HD media experience living room a better one. Simply connecting your O!Play HD Media Player via HDMI and you can then stream HD content stream from your PC or NAS to the Media Player and then watch them on your 1080P HDTV!



Article Title: ASUS O!Play Air HDP-R3 Media Player Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1350/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $109.99 after rebate

Nice review, I need to look at the guts of my Argosy HV335T and see how they compare. I added a 1TB drive to the unit I picked up and have slowly been adding ISOs to it.

Many media players are now allowing YouTube and Netflix to be shown directly through the media players' interface, so one could expect this feature to come to the O!Player Air in the future.

I really wish it had Netflix capabilities, as I'd be out buying it right now. That, and I wish it did Blu-ray menus, but that's a feature I can live without. Did you test to see if it streamed the TrueHD and Master Audio correctly to your receiver? If it does, I might get one now and hope Netflix support is added later.

We have a review sample of the WD TV Live Plus HD media player and it has Netflix support, so stay tuned for that review in the weeks to come.

gwolfman wrote:

Many media players are now allowing YouTube and Netflix to be shown directly through the media players' interface, so one could expect this feature to come to the O!Player Air in the future.

I really wish it had Netflix capabilities, as I'd be out buying it right now. That, and I wish it did Blu-ray menus, but that's a feature I can live without. Did you test to see if it streamed the TrueHD and Master Audio correctly to your receiver? If it does, I might get one now and hope Netflix support is added later.

Like other players, the O!Play is designed to recognize HD Audio and in some cases decode the discrete channels for your home theater. I've really never been able to get any of the set top boxes to do this consistently with all formats and codecs. I am actually satisfied with a box that can identify the HD audio and "pass" the audio to the TV or Receiver for decoding. The O!Play identified and passed one of my files successfully (w/ Dolby TrueHD), but it gave me an "unknown audio type" error on the other file.

The one file that the audio was working also stuttered really bad (was playing the Blu-ray ISO it via Ethernet connection). The file that gave me the error was a Blu-ray ISO from a local drive.

It could be that I need to re-encode a new Blu-ray for testing, but the bottom line was that we had "mixed results". :-/

You might want to wait a little bit to see what sort of firmware (or other announcements) come out in the next few weeks. There is a rumor of a USB 3.0-based ASUS box coming this summer. I think the guys saw it at Computex...we'll see if it hits the States.

Apoptosis wrote:We have a review sample of the WD TV Live Plus HD media player and it has Netflix support, so stay tuned for that review in the weeks to come.

Thanks, I'm looking forward to it.

Digital Puppy wrote:

gwolfman wrote:

Many media players are now allowing YouTube and Netflix to be shown directly through the media players' interface, so one could expect this feature to come to the O!Player Air in the future.

I really wish it had Netflix capabilities, as I'd be out buying it right now. That, and I wish it did Blu-ray menus, but that's a feature I can live without. Did you test to see if it streamed the TrueHD and Master Audio correctly to your receiver? If it does, I might get one now and hope Netflix support is added later.

Like other players, the O!Play is designed to recognize HD Audio and in some cases decode the discrete channels for your home theater. I've really never been able to get any of the set top boxes to do this consistently with all formats and codecs. I am actually satisfied with a box that can identify the HD audio and "pass" the audio to the TV or Receiver for decoding. The O!Play identified and passed one of my files successfully (w/ Dolby TrueHD), but it gave me an "unknown audio type" error on the other file.

The one file that the audio was working also stuttered really bad (was playing the Blu-ray ISO it via Ethernet connection). The file that gave me the error was a Blu-ray ISO from a local drive.

It could be that I need to re-encode a new Blu-ray for testing, but the bottom line was that we had "mixed results". :-/

You might want to wait a little bit to see what sort of firmware (or other announcements) come out in the next few weeks. There is a rumor of a USB 3.0-based ASUS box coming this summer. I think the guys saw it at Computex...we'll see if it hits the States.

I'll be sure to keep an eye out for this.