ASUS O!Play HDP-R1 HD Media Player Review - PAGE 3

Let's first take a look at how to get the O!Play to play media. One can toggle between the "Music", "Movies" and "Photos" by pressing the "Mode" button on the remote control, or by choosing them from the main menu. At anytime, pressing the "Home" button (the one with the little house) brings the user back to that main menu.

The most complete sub-menu is the music one. The music can be browsed according to its genre, artist, date and album. One can also access the music by browsing the folders or the recently played list, whereas the two other modes don't have as much options.

Let's now explore the file browser of the O!Play. Once the user has chosen between "Storage Device", "Network" or "UPnP", the folders appear as on a real computer. The unit can be connected to either a router or directly to a PC. While browsing a device on the network, one can access the shared folders directly if they are shared with everyone, or log in to have access to protected areas. For example, by entering the main Windows account using the keyboard appearing on the screen, all partitions can be accessed. Another possibility is to add the "OPlayer" default account to the shared users list. At this point, one can select a music, video or picture to play or watch. It would have been great if it were supporting midi as well as playlist files though.

In the case of music, by pressing the "Display" button on the remote control, the index of the playlist and timeline of the track appear in a blue rectangle. The playlist corresponds to everything in the current folder. To shuffle the order, one just has to hit the "Shuffle" button on the remote control. It is the glossy with a music note on it.

While the music is playing, one can watch photos by simply changing the media mode. Here is an example with a screenshot of Colin McRae DiRT 2. While browsing, a thumbnail of the current file is displayed on the right. One can always hit the "Display" button to see the music playlist index, as I have just said.  Also, as you might have noticed, I have a picture of Sisko from Star Trek, but unfortunately we are not going to take a look at it since the O!Play does not support animated .gif files.

One can then display the picture fullscreen by hitting the "OK" button. A zoom in can also be done with the magnifier button. They can also be rotated with the arrows. If one wants to display the pictures one by one in the folder, a slideshow can be started by hitting the "Play/Pause" button.

As for movies, it will also display a preview on the right, like for pictures. Hitting the play button will display it fullscreen. It also supports DVD and BD iso files, which will make use of the "Subtitles" and "Language" buttons on the remote control. It lacks support for these physical media via an external drive though, but I hope this will come with a future firmware update. The power consumption during 1080P playback from a USB drive remained at a steady 7W, which is very impressive. The top of the unit became a little warm, but that's about it. Without any storage device plugged in and idling on the home menu, it consumed 6W.