Posted Mon Nov 16, 2009 at 01:00 PM PST by Mike Attebery
The newest model of the O!Play media player from Asus brings a few important improvements over the previous model.
The most notable difference between the older O!Play and the new O!Play HDP-R3 is 802.11n wireless networking support. By eliminating cable clutter, or the need to run an Ethernet cable to the back of the device, the O!Play HDP-R3 makes the whole networked media streaming thing a bit easier to deal with.
Also new to the HDP-R3 is a multi card reader on the side. The additional inputs allow the use of CF, SD, MMC, Memory Stick and Memory Stick Duo cards for audio and video playback.
Asus is one of few companies that provides information on every single format their media player can handle without tacking “and more” onto the end. They’d be pretty well justified in doing so though, as the list is impressive.
The O!Play HDP-R3 can play a wide range of video files, and offers support for mp4, mov, xvid, avi, asf, wmv, mkv, rm, rmvb, flv, ts, m2ts, dat, mpg, vob, mts, tp, trp, and iso files. It supports all the audio fromats one would expect: MP3, WAV, AAC, OGG, FLAC, AIFF, LPCM, WMA, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, and DTS. The HDP-R3 supports the usual range of image formats, as well as four different subtitle formats.
An official price has not yet been announced, but the player is expected to launch later this year at around $129.
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