Remote controls are in most cases neglected part of whole package and most often ugly and worthless, but ASUS did its homework and didn’t made same mistake. By its dimensions remote control has “golden ratio”: not too many buttons but all essential and most frequently used buttons are present. Connecting with TV set is simple but HDMI cable is not provided in the package: only composite is present. Audiophiles can use stereo output or, optical S/PDIF although this cable is also absent. On supplied disc can be found manual and GNU licensed source code of Linux used as base for this player. There is no software for video conversion since list of supported formats is very long, and it is highly unlikely that you will ever need to convert video just to be able to play it on ASUS O!Play. Detail that differentiate this player from most other models is presence of LAN connector. This allows O!Play to access any NAS or PC on network and play videos from there. Since there is no internal storage device (flash memory, hard disk drive etc) presence of USB and eSATA connectors are warmly welcomed. Presence of eSATA port is very interesting since there are more and more external drives with this port. Since eSATA has also USB symbol beside it no additional power source will be needed for external drives since eSATA port is powered.

As we already mentioned O!Play uses modified Linux thanks to which device becomes ready to play videos very soon after the device is powered on. One of the first options that we tested was copying of data from one media to another since this is very rare function on these devices. It worked perfectly. User interface is simple and user friendly. Little bit of additional “make-up” wouldn’t hurt it, but it isn’t bad. All formats from specification are supported, even most demanding MKV formats were played without a hitch. Small problems were experienced during enabling and disabling subtitles. Also small pause was noticeable before video reproduction. Subtitles are supported, of course, in separate file or inside the container. You can choose which font will be used but you should check if support for your country specific codepage is present. As all other players, O!Play also plays AC3 sound on stereo speakers, but DTS is only passed thru. This will result in silence on stereo speakers as well as stereo on surround system. Luckily this can be corrected with one option that is easily accessible true menu system, which shows that ASUS engineers did thought about this problem.