ASUS O!PLAY Air HDP-R3 Wireless Network Media Player HDMI LAN USB2.0 eSATA Composite A/V SPDIF MKV

Comment:
My wife and I bought this so that we can access all the movies, music, and photos that reside on our three networked computers (1 desktop, 2 laptops). It works well, with movies playing from my desktop upstairs on on family room tv without any hiccups... but we did have issues getting it set up.Out of the box, with firmware 1.21N, the O!Play Air would not properly detect that our network used WPA security, as it insisted on connecting with WEP. We would have switched our network settings to WEP but my wife's Mac doesn't permit that protocol (nor should it, as WPA is more secure) so it wasn't an option.I did get technical help from ASUS very quickly, and after sorting through some issues I have to assume were related to language barriars/poor manual translation, we updated the firmware to 1.23N, and now things work well.It just seems odd that a 3rd or 4th generation firmware, 1.21N, could not properly connect to a WPA network. That should be automatic for a device of this nature in this day and age.

Comment:
I don't think it's worth $150, if you can find it on special at around $120 maybe it's not a bad deal.Overall it does the job for me, it plays 95% of my media, however I don't use the wireless function so I wonder if it was a good choice to buy this unit, maybe the non-wireless was a better choice for me (since it's cheaper)Don't bother with the on-line broadcasting media (internet TV and RADIO) it's really rabish and the quality is awful.

Comment:
The ASUS O!Play is very good at streaming wirelessly. I am very impressed as my PS3 used to jitter very frequently when streaming but this unit does not AT ALL. The Wi-Fi signal was consistent when watching Iron Man 2 in HD 1080p and only jittered for about 3 seconds throughout the whole film. I can't complain and the overall setup was fairly easy.

Comment:
Just don't buy this product. I was unable to use the wireless mode like many others, tried everything, all mode, everything. Couldn't access to my network shares even wired because of denied access even if an account was set with full permissions, no firewall and so om. All i could do is play from USB stick, and this is with latest firmware.Check the Asus support site and you'll see that most of the features don't work, like internet radio, tv, remember last files, EVERYTHING. It doesn't even play at 1080p, this product is a joke.

Comment:
One day delivery from NCIX.com is amazing, you guys are awesome.I have upgraded firmware to latest version as of Sept 1-2010.I have owned the wdtvlive for four or more months prior to getting the asus o!play. I can tell you that its handy for running on the bedroom tv that can't have a Ethernet cord run to it from my network router in other part of house that has the dlink 2bay NAS with all my 300+ movies. Playback of videos is choppy, format support is less then wdtvlive, menu text is small. Wireless network connection is iffy, have to try a few times to get it to work, stupid thing asks for id and password when there isn't any!I hope WD comes out with a Live media player with wireless feature, that would be perfect.