WHDI Reviews – Wireless HDTV News

The ASUS O!Play Air – Wireless N TV HD Media Player has gone through a recent upgrade to become one of the most robust HDTV media players around. With its built in high speed WiFi capability and high expandability, it has become one of the best devices around for those who want to playback their digital media content on their HDTV’s.

Like most other media players in this category, it has a huge list of supported file formats ranging from video formats to audio and image formats. In aiming for a very high bandwidth set up, Asus has made the O!Player Air device Wireless N capable. That means you will need a router that can handle 80.11n standards of high bandwidth (up to 300Mbps). But other than that, this device should work with almost everything that you can throw at it.

It has a plethora of ports to connect storage devices to. Other than Wireless, Ethernet, eSata/USB, it also has a multi-card reader where you can plug in CF (Compact Flash), SD, MMC, MS and MS Duo cards and read the data directly off them. These are the most common card formats used in digital cameras and camcorders.

It comes with the usual remote and set up is almost none. Except for network troubleshooting of course, in case you have a very complicated home network. However, if you have set it up yourself, you probably know your way around it. The player connects to your TV via HDMI 1.3 or Composite video. For audio there is S/PDIF and stereo out. There are two USB ports and one is an e-SATA combo.

The user interface is pretty simple and it gives you access to Flickr, Picasa and some Internet TV as well. But so far there’s no YouTube support. Here’s the only place where it falls short of the competition, which offers YouTube and also Netflix in certain cases. Over all though, the ASUS O!Play Air – Wireless N TV HD Media Player is well worth the $125 that is commanding right now, especially because of the forward looking Wireless N feature.