ASUS to introduce O!Play media player

With more and more people wanting to enjoy their digital music and video collections someplace other than at the computer, the interest in so called media players continues to grow. Not a week goes by without the introduction of a new brand or model. Although by now there are dozens of players, consumers have less choice than they might imagine: the number of manufacturers of the required media chips is limited, and truly well performing variants are even more rare.

So the market has quite a few products with varying looks and external connectors, but basically identical innards. At Computex ASUS will introduct a media player of their own, which should be worthwhile for at least one reason: it is based on a new (very probably made by Realtek) chip, which significantly more powerful than preceding models. If you have been keeping up with this field, you will know what we mean when we say it can easily compete and even outperform the famous, oft-used Sigma 8634/8635.

ASUS' new media player, the HDP-R1 O!Play

Hardware.Info had the opportunity to be the first to take a closer look at the O!Play, as ASUS is calling the player (code HDP-R1) for now. We will of course bring you a full review later, but our first impressions are very positive. The player is a lot faster and more responsive than models we have tested so far. Not only is the file format compatibility very good even in this initial firmware version, the O!Play appears to have significantly better video postprocessing than any other media player we tested until now.

Another feature that is liable to draw approval is the eSATA connector, which should markedly improve transfers from an external disk.

A rarity on media players: eSATA. ASUS installed a combined USB/eSATA port.

The other connectors offer only the bare necessities: stereo audio, composite video, optic digital audio, HDMI. The network interface enables streaming playback from a NAS, PC or Home Server.

Only the most basic connectors are available.

Codec and container support:

Video:

Mpeg 1, 2, 4, DivX (tot 1920x1080p)
H.264, VC-1, RM/RMVB
AVI, VOB, MOV, MKV, ASF, Xvid, WMV

Audio:

Mp3, WAV, PCM/LPCM, AAC, Dolby Digital, FLAC, DTS (!), AIFF, OGG

Subtitles:

SRT, SUB, SMI, SSA

Images:

JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF, TIFF

Price:

According to ASUS, the O!Play should be in stores in about six weeks, with a recommended retail price around 119 euro, which would make it extremely competitive.

Hardware.Info will soon feature a full review of this player.

Tags: hd computex dolby digital dts esata firmware hdmi usb

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