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These media based products are centered around ease of use in a social, living room environment, and as such their interfaces are streamlined, easy to navigate systems suitable for parents, grandparents and children.
The main menu system is arranged in a circle which will immediately confuse those who have tried an A.C. Ryan product because to navigate on the Asus unit you push up and down rather than left and right. Again it may sound anal of us to even mention this but personally I feel ‘left' and ‘right' makes much more sense.
Aesthetically the interface is acceptable, with clearly labeled icons for all the subsections. You will notice that when the icons aren't taking primary focus in the foreground that they lose their labels, which makes things slightly more difficult than they should be.
This is something unpleasant we find with most of these systems, the interface design seems somewhat secondary to the functionality which makes it hard to move from an Apple TV unit with its beautiful interface to something so clunky and gaudy.
There are four main sub menus, music, movies, photos and all media, which consist of a list of browsing options on the left with a preview and playback window on the right. Video, images and all media can be browsed by folder, date or recently played while music allows for album, singer and genre options. MP3 indexing only works on USB devices and not memory cards or networked areas – meaning you lose artist and album information.
The setup option on the main screen is a good first port of call to configure the Asus unit for your specific panel and audio equipment.
The system menu is a helpful way to get a complete overview of the unit – detailing firmware, menu language options and the means to adjust the times via the internet for automatic correction.
Unlike the A.C. Ryan products the Asus O!Play Air HDP-R3 unit has built in wireless N connectivity which is very good to see. This saves an additional purchase requirement and helps keep the physical footprint to a minimum.
Night mode, which is identical to the A.C. Ryan units, offers compressed audio which means that vocal tracks are easier to hear so the overall volume can be reduced. It actually works very well and we use it a lot for late night viewing.
There are a handful of audio output options catered for meaning everyone will find an output setting to suit their specific configuration.
They keep comin thick n fast, love it 🙂 Good review, seems a good item from Asus but up against stiff competition from AC RYAN.
The adding of wireless N is a great idea, keeps down the size and I wondered why AC RYan didnt do that themselves, would only cost them a fiver.
Bummer about the HDMI cable, those can cost a fair chunk of change if you get a good one.
surprised how similar the interface systems are between these players. Asus haven’t done much with the submenu designs which is quite dissapointing, and I dnot ilke the tiny remote. looks like one you get with a clock radio stereo system./
THe pricing is good, I wouldnt need an HDMI cable, but I like the fact that AC RYan seem to update their software and fix bugs every week nearly with beta firmwares. Asus aren’t really concentrating on this market that much so its just another range for them. id pay the bit extra, get the cable, lose wireless and go with 100% support.
I was going to ask this last time, but since this review went up earlier ill ask it now. How hard would it be for them to add options such as sharpness, noise reduction etc? It puts me off all of these as im really fussy about image quality and opted for a lowish end ATI card for my media center, it has transformed it.
I would love to see one of these in action as I am picky about HD quality. it sounds great, but sometimes I watch older shows and I like being able to increase noise reduction and fine tune settings in the panels. These dont seem to offer any.
Well im going to be in the minority here but id opt for this one over the AC Ryan mini, because I have tons of HDMI cables, I would like wireless without more boxes and would assume asus are a much larger company with more activity on the forums.
Thank you very much for reviewing this for me, I want to buy one of these.
I was wondering if this was better than the AC RYAN Mini, and it seems they are based around the same core structure and hardware with varying levels of update methodologies. I think the Asus one is a better deal overall, but AC Ryan get a good reptutation for being extremely active with the community as this is ALL they do.
Good review and I see someone else is a psych fan 🙂 funny show.
Good review as usual from Z, especially considering we see at least one review at day from him 😀
As for the loss of the HDMI cable, just go to your local electronics store and find them on sale, got one a while back, its 1.3a and all, cost me $10NZD or about 3.50 quid i think, use it with my 360 works great and there is absolutely no noticeable difference between this cable and a $80 NZD cable or about 30 quid? same length and all. But all in all definitely worth the upgrade over RCA cables
Hello everyone,
To Tom about A.C Ryan and no wifi:
Currently built-in wireless connectivity solutions perform poorly and are unreliable when it comes to data transmission due to signal reception issues. This results in players with built-in wireless having an unacceptable wireless performance.
In our labs, we are working on possible solutions to have built-in wireless that can perform better than current solutions. When we are able to do this, we will consider implementing built-in wireless into the players. In the meantime our optional Playon! wireless-N USB Dongle is available to users and is the more reliable, affordable, high performance option, at the end of the day AC Ryan will always deliver to market hardware that provides the best user experience.
Br,
Mikael
Hello Mikael, thank you for the information. I never experienced any wifi issues with the ASUS unit in testing across my home network, but it does make sense in some instances that an external antenna would give stronger signal strength.
The UK pricing for this device has been appended as we have found that the UK price of £80, is no longer linking to the correct store. The Asus OPLAY is £100 inc vat which means that the AC Ryan product is clearly better value for money, specifically in regards to the firmware situation.
Z,
I’m sure that you can answer this. Is there a way with this product or the AC Ryan system to play DVDs over the network. I have all of my DVDs ripped as ISOs on my media server and I was just wondering if something like this would work in my living room.
Hello Procupine14 – they can indeed play ISO files and even extracted DVD folders with a _TS structure. very capable players.
As an Asus O!Play Air user I can tell you that Mikael is right. The wireless on the Air is pretty useless unless it’s going to be sitting right next to the router. But even that is not the biggest problem. If you try to stream wirelessly you’d better be absolutely sure that this is what you want to see and all your options are set up correctly – because the remote becomes useless as soon as it starts streaming wirelessly! If you enjoy pressing buttons 10 or 15 times to get a response (and even then only if you’re lucky) then this is the player for you. If you enjoy asking Asus on their forums to fix it for the better part of a year and the only response is “we’re adding 500 new internet tv channels” (most of which don’t work) followed by a complete absence of Asus support personnel for months at a time – then this is the player for you. If you enjoy the bog standard, clunky basic Realtek GUI with no attempt to improve it – then this is the player for you.
If you enjoy a player that the company cares about, if you enjoy the feeling that the company cares about it’s customers who paid good money for the product, if you want a company that develops the firmware and the product capabilities, if you just want a player that works as advertised – BUY SOMETHING ELSE!!