Home > Consumer Reviews > ASUS O!Play - TV HD Media Player (Black)

I have the following setup:
* Windows 7 Home
* iTunes to manage my music
* Picasa 3 to manage my photos
* VLC to play my videos
* All media is viewable via Windows Media Center

All my media is on the local hard drive in my Windows 7 computer. My DVDs are saved as ISO files and .dvr-ms files. Music is M4A and MP3, photos are JPG.
If you have Windows 7 and want to keep your media on the Windows 7 machine, I do not recommend the O!play due to its setup complexity. I think one would be better off with a Media Center Extender. Extenders easily connect to Windows 7 and can see all the media that Media Center has automatically indexed.

If you are determined to use the O!play with Windows 7, you must follow the following steps:
1. Download the lasted firmware upgrade from ASUS support site and install it. This is very important, as the O!play will not work with Windows 7 without it. This is a bit confusing as you need to select "Linux" in the drop-down on the ASUS site to get the firmware: [...]
2. Share out your media folders by creating a new share on your user account in C:\Users
3. If you do not use a password on your Windows 7 machine, "Turn off password protected sharing" in the Windows 7 network & sharing center control panel -> Advanced sharing settings
4. Set the "Everyone" user to have "Read", "List folder contents" and "Read and execute permissions" to your 3 media folders
5. Try connecting from your O!play to the Windows 7 machine.

Also, O!play does not play dvr-ms video files.

Lastly, O!play does not have a way to view online video from Hulu, YouTube, Amazon or Netflix. It is not a web-based streamer.

The good news is, if you want to play ISO DVDs, the O!Play video quality is very good. But, I think I am going to return it and get a "net top" PC and run iTunes & XBMC on it.

The picture quality is not as good as of the WD HDTV
Although it can handle more codecs (esp audio) than WD HDTV, the picture freezes constantly during HD playback
It is only good for norm definition movies
Interface is acceptable compared to WD HDTV although it does not give you the file list options of the WD TV
The networking facilities are impressive

I bought this item with the hope I could access all of my data from my TV, and it lives up to the challenge.
The minute I received this item I did a firmware upgrade to the lastest 1.17N version (as of this review). This fixed some issues: Not being able to connect to windows 7 machines was the most important for me. Problem solved!

This is the prefect replacement for those of us who want an inexpensive alternative to a popcorn hour (and don't need all the bells and whistles of that device). HDMI works like a charm, and you also can get audio signal from the goodie but oldie RCA output (in case you want to connect it to an external source like a receiver)

Another thing that I liked is the fact that you can connect a USB HUB to the USB port of the Asus O!Play. Not only it will recognize it but it will also "see" all the external drives connected to it ! So you can easily have 4 hard disks or usb sticks connected to one single port !!

Awesomeness doesn't stop there: The O!Play will read all video formats available, from simple FLV's passing through the standard AVI's and the most recent MKV's.

Maybe the only thing I would add is the ability to connect through wifi (that's why I've thought first for the WD Live TV), but then you must realize that high-bitrate videos like large bandwitdh and you ain't gonna get that through a basic 802.11g connection (at least at average rates). So better stick with Ethernet. (Or buy the new O!Play Air device)

I bought one of these for my brother for Christmas and plan on buying one for myself as well. The O!Play does one thing and it does it very, very well - it plays media, any media, flawlessly. Some pros and cons:

Pros:
- Plays everything we threw at it first time perfectly. We tried various resolutions and bit rates of every format I could make or find - MPEG2, MPEG4 (many flavors of this), Windows WMVs, Apple MOV, DivX, XVid, raw .VOBs, etc.

- Video quality is very good - a 1080p movie played on this vs. my Windows Media Center machine was better. Truthfully, I don't know how much of that was the display (his is a Samsung, mine is a Vizio) and how much was the player, but I'm convinced at least *some* was the player.

- Audio quality is very good - we were hooking via optical to a 5.1 system and it sounded great. A scene we tried in a Roman coliseum made us feel like we were there with crowd sounds behind us and the fight in front.

- Versatile media sources - worked flawlessly accessing a Windows XP machine over the network, a memory stick, 2 different external hard drives, even an SD card in a reader.

- Very easy to installation - we attached the HDMI cable to the TV, the optical cable to the AMP, the CAT 5 to the switch and powered it on and it worked the first time.

- Simple to use interface - it ain't pretty (see Cons), but it does the job and it's easy to figure out what to do and what buttons to press. If you've ever used a computer GUI (Windows, OSX, etc.) to go through files, this'll make sense.

Cons:
- The user interface isn't extra pretty. It's functional, but it's not pretty - not even close to what you'll find in systems like Windows Media Center, My Movies for Media Center, Boxee, or even web sites like Hulu. Once you get past the first rather attractive screen where you pick movies, music, pictures, etc., you're in what looks a whole lot like Windows Explorer. It works, but there's no WOW factor here.

- Yet another box(s) for your A/V rack. You'll likely need to find room not just for this box, but the hard drive you'll probably hook to it in your rack. This isn't a big box, but it's not small either - about the size of a couple of thick hard bound books laying on each other.

- The remote. It's usable, but it's not exactly high-end. If you have a nice programmable, you'll end up using it. If you don't, you'll probably be buying one.

Overall, this box is a great value - it does what it says it does and does it very well. The one failure of many of these types of boxes is the worry about video format and as far as I can tell, this box pretty much eliminates that fear. At least, I can't find anything it won't play. It's not always pretty, but I'll give up a little flash for something that works, especially at this price point.

Addition - I note that at least one review here claims that this device will only work with FAT32 formatted drives. This is incorrect. My brother uses this with an NTFS drive and we commonly play files that range in size from 5GB to 12GB.

Saw this in a previous review: "It even plays Flash Video (FLV), a feature rarely encountered"

Well, it is a "feature" only if it works ;-).

As a professional streamer, FLV files are the biggie - still king over WMV and h.264. And I have not found a single one in our archive that plays. Just "Invalid File" in the thumbnail screen. FLVs encoded for old Flash 6+ Spark codec and newer On2VP6 codec. And these are just regular 480 resolution files that stream fine with Wowza and FMS and that play just fine locally in the Adobe player (custom Flash and the end-user Adobe Media Player app)... FLV is a no go even with with firmware release "N".

Also... our common storage for raw video files is DV AVI... this VERY common format is also a no-play.

Unfortunately, while we doubted the claim of FLV (Adobe does not like folks being able to play those files without paying for the ability) and could live without it, we never dreamed that DV-AVI would be unsupported, it is such a widely used common denominator type. It was only after buying and seeing all of the "Invalid File" lines for every file that we dug into it and found the one-liner ASUS admission that DV is not and Will Not Be supported.

Ah well... for less than a hundred bucks it's a fine enough little guy to play your divx/xvid/wmv9 and semi-legal rips from a portable drive or over your network but for us isn't a great way to check our FLV (old or new) or uncompressed dv files quickly on a tv screen.

just my 2 pennies, as a person who wanted it to live up to its much-copied-in-reviews hype of "plays everything" ... probably going to return it. Hope you fare better.