The O! Play boots after turning in just 5 seconds, and produces virtually no crackling on an already switched amplifier. The handling is very intuitive and most liquid. Only after connecting / switching on a USB drive you have about 10-15 seconds to wait, and the Internet Radio menu also takes some patience. The remote control has a "Settings" button, with which you can change from any menu settings - very convenient. In general, the design of the remote control is good, you will find important buttons like volume, play, pause, stop, etc. even in the dark.
After connecting a hard drive of O scans! Play this and writes some index files to the root directory. This is not without risk: There is no disk deregistration process as under Windows (or "umount" under Linux), it can easily happen that you subtract during writing the hard disk or off and (or O Play crashes!) file system is damaged. Then no longer reads the O! Play the plate then, because the incomplete written files can be deleted or overwritten. In my case, even Windows XP could not delete the files, and I had to reformat the disk. Unfortunately, you can not see when the player is writing - you really have to keep your ear to the plate and listen carefully before being pulled.
=== === Video
The strength of the O! Play is the excellent video format support. All these formats work fine, and my copy even played material from which made the VLC on Windows XP crashes (!). In this regard, I agree with the current c't test, in which, however, almost all other tested player next to the O! Play received a "++" in this area.
The image is razor sharp, even when panning jerky nothing - just perfect. The analog video output and HDMI output can be used simultaneously; which is handy for projector users that similar an old TV for listening to music must connect to not always for the Internet Radio to turn on the projector.
The support of ISO images is rudimentary: You can navigate through the DVD menu and for example, start playback of a chapter, back to the menu to get but only after the end of reproduction - a "Menu" button is missing. Fascinating country in the main movie so you have to stop playback and open the ISO image again. After all, that's pretty fast.
As you navigate through the video preview is automatically displayed, which in principle also works well and is helpful ("Were we still in Season 3 Disc 5 or even at Season 4 Disc 1?"). However, one has to actually start a video, wait for the initialization of the preview, because the player does not respond during this - this is annoying if you nevertheless times know exactly what you want to select.
=== === Photos
The Slideshow feature can be easily operated, is sufficiently fast and supports zooming. To scale Simple filters are used, so that oblique lines sometimes look very pixelated.
=== === Audio
Music playback support the O! Play unfortunately neglected. OGGs and MP3s took him about every 2-3 tracks to crash - the exact same files work for years without any problems in all the other players, Winamp to the car radio. And "crash" means the O! Play, that not even the remote control works - then you have to willy-nilly, to pull the plug.
Navigating through music files is only practical for small collections: All entries will be displayed as a big list, so you have to scroll to the "middle" letters M and N (for example, "Madonna") by half the list - Search is not possible. This is no longer feasible in more than 100 CDs; one hears necessarily only AC / DC and ZZ Top. This problem can be circumvented by creating 26 directories named "A", "B", ..., "Z" and pushes the albums there - effective but not exactly comfortable.
The display of ID3 tags did not work with my copy - there were only a few characters to see that does not really belong to the Western European character sets.
=== === Online Services
Support for Internet radio, the Asus nachlieferte via firmware update is very unkind and the overall concept of the player poorly integrated. The channel list takes the player to the SHOUTcast service, which in principle is customer-friendly: The transmitters are free and there is a huge international selection (in the order tens of thousands). Unfortunately lacks many of the official, that is listed on shoutcast.com stations. Of the 18 SomaFM transmitters such as the Asus knows only one third. Below is a brief guide on how to get any station via Telnet in the Favorites list, but that's of course uncomfortable and annoying, given the frequently changing stream URLs in the long run, even for a handful of channels.
Playlists (.pls, .m3u) with Internet radio URLs support the unit (although there may indeed play streams), and dynamic metadata (ie current title) is not displayed in the radio mode. On a positive note, that in addition to MP3 and AAC + -Streams (and probably OGG, I have not tested) can be played. Crashes or stream crashes when I had no web radio.
=== === Untested
Select the menu item "Internet TV" I have been selected, then the player crashed promptly. Since held my curiosity in check, I have not pursued. Flickr and Picasa and playback over LAN / WLAN I have also not been tested.
=== === Telnet access
Via Telnet (user name root, no password) to log in to the Linux system that runs on the O! Play. Are in the directory / usr / local / etc / dvdplayer whopping 8 files that represent the favorite list:
1. IRxStationBitRate
2. IRxStationCodec
3. IRxStationFavorite
4. IRxStationGenre
5. IRxStationRegion
6. IRxStationStream
7. IRxStationUrl
8. IRxStationWebsite
Each contains exactly one row per favorites, ie all must contain the same number of lines (to check with "wc -l *"). Really important is IRxStationUrl (for the stream URL) and IRxStationFavorite (for the name in the Favorites list). For example, the stream "SomaFM Secret Agent" add, simply adds to the stream URL and the name in these two files and adds in the other files to a blank line:
echo [...] >> IRxStationUrl
echo SomaFM Secret Agent >> IRxStationFavorite
echo >> IRxStationBitRate
echo >> IRxStationCodec
echo >> IRxStationGenre
echo >> IRxStationRegion
echo >> IRxStationStream
echo >> IRxStationWebsite
=== === Conclusion
If you want to only watch videos, the O! Play is well suited. However, there are numerous competitors that are smaller and / or less expensive and do not endanger USB disks by writing index files. The ISO support is the only feature that the O! Play some of these devices has ahead. Who puts on audio playback value, however, it is from the hard drive or from the radio stream, is safe with the Asus product is not happy.
