New Asus Media Player to compete with WD TV

Western Digital's WD TV continues to inspire other manufacturers, and today, it's Asus' turn to attempt a challenge at the American company's flagship model. We can look forward to HD video, HDMI connections and network compatibility.

Just like its direct competitor, the WD TV, the Asus!OPlay HDP-R1 HD Media Player (it's a catchy name) is in a small box with no room for a hard drive. Instead, you need to connect some kind of storage device, using either the USB or the e-SATA port.

Alternatively, you can stream content over a network thanks to the Ethernet port, although there's no WiFi.

Audio and video connectors represent the bare minimum: HDMI, component video and optical audio. More impressively, power consumption is listed at less than 10 W for the time being.


The list of compatible formats also seems very complete, although we don't yet know all of the details:

• Video codecs: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC, MPEG-4 ASP, VC-1, RM
• Video container formats: MP4, MOV, XVID, AVI, DVIX, ASF, WMV, MKV, RM, RMVB, FLV, TS M2TS, DAT MPG, VOB
• Audio codecs: MP3, WAV, AAC, OGG, FLAC, AIFF

What remains to be seem is exactly what HD video codecs are supported, how nice the interface looks, and, of course, the price. The WD TV performs well on all three fronts.

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