Asus O!Play Mini

Following the AC Ryan Essential and the WD TV HD, here we have the Asus O!Play Mini, another basic media centre which is happy to offer just the essentials: playback of multimedia files and that's it! There's no network or internal hard drive. You just plug in your USB peripheral or memory card and this makes for a lower overall price.

Not a particularly attractive interface

Compact and well-finished, the O!Play Mini looks pretty nice. You can't say the same for the remote however. It's built out of poor quality plastic and the design makes it look as if it should be used to operate your grandparents' video player.


Asus hasn't made much of an effort with the graphics interface. It may have the main features but it's a long way off the interface design to be found on competition products.

We do like being able to view the photos in miniature form (8 per page), or create a mini video jukebox manually (only the film posters). With music, only mp3 tags are recognised. Album covers can't be viewed during playback.


It has an identical cataloguing system to the AC Ryan Playon!HD Essential but this doesn't add any value. The filters are useful for music, but only mp3 files will be listed in the index. You end up mainly using standard browsing by folder.

Compatibility: no major issues

No major media file playback issues. We liked how quickly (just half a second) you can move from one photo to the next.


DTS and Dolby Digital tracks can be decoded (downmix stereo or PCM mutichannel) or sent to an external audio amp in bitstream. Only the core part is retained on HD versions of these formats.

Connectivity: Asus keeps to the essential

Older TVs can link up to the composite socket, HD TVs to the HDMI connector. You can send the audio via the optical out, in analogue (RCA stereo) or by the HDMI out. There's just one USB port, on the front of the casing. This is a shame as we would have liked to see a second port at the back. Lastly, there's also an SDHC card reader.