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Reply With QuoteActually It's the HD2, not the Gallery. Can mods please help adjust the details? Thanks
Hi all
So after 3 months of waiting my media drive finally pitched.
It's the Asus o! Gallery and I have set it up already and was watching Jimmy Carr last night on it.
ASUSTeK Computer Inc. - Multimedia- ASUS O!Play Gallery
First impressions:
It's very light and wide. I was expecting very little extra width from the size of a hard drive as most of these have 99% of all components situated under the hard drive.
The remote reminds me a bit of a kiddies toy but the buttons are there to guide you using a picture rather than English (Understandable).
What I most like about this drive is how easy it is to remove the drive. One screw, shift the lid and open, other media boxes have many screws and are so snug that you have to be careful to not compress anything.
I need to test with Blue-Ray rips to the drive to see if it'll play proper HD videos but it does do 1080P.
It says it comes with Wifi, USB 3.0 and is ithingy compatible. Not sure about the Wifi-I can find the USB 3.0 so I'll keep looking but in my experience, transferring files over wifi is pointless. It'll be for the online features really.
Will update soon with details. The drive cost me 100 pounds in the UK but shipping was 50 pounds thanks to a mix up. My dad was supposed to bring it back in his luggage but the delivery day was tight and we missed Amazon.
I specifically wanted a media drive that could take 3.5" drives for various reasons including backing up to and from my laptop and not connecting via USB to a hard drive (such as the small media drives do).
Regards,
JJ
Actually It's the HD2, not the Gallery. Can mods please help adjust the details? Thanks
What I like: It is quick to boot. It's simple. It just works as a media center. The remote doesn't need to be pointed at the thing from 3 feet away, nice IR sensor. The change from blue LED for on to Orange for sleep is nice. It comes with an HDMI cable. USB 3.0 is great for shifting media. It has media card slots in the front and USB for my phone. Easy to insert and remote drive, one screw and bam. It functions like an external hard drive which is great for when I want to reinstall a PC. It's small but solid. My friends like it. It's Asus so they will support it. Nice to chill in bed and listen to music with it.
What I don't like: It's not very good at music when you want to go through several songs. It's as if the codecs haven't kicked in and there's stuttering. You can only have one service going at a time (SAMBA, torrent, etc). The wifi dongle is a fortune retail. It doesn't come with a USB cable. I can't map the drive through the network though which is odd. I want to be able to transfer via LAN cable too and have a virtual drive mapped to it. The auto scan function searches for all the media on the drive and it is very annoying. I know where all my videos are.
I give it a solid 8/10. Wifi is not a biggie. There are little online services I really want to use through it and you cannot reasonably transfer a gig of data through wifi. It's just too slow. I use my LAN over power and it's fine.
i will note one thing. Watching videos on a media box is 100 times better than a PC. There's no start button, playlist (it just carries on to the next video) and it's fast to boot up.
Well played media box, well played. I watched 6 episodes of Calafornication Season 1 last night in a row.
At 100 pounds the HP Microserver with my own software seems like an infinitely better deal.
Sure it's a bit bigger, but also takes 4 hard drives.
I'm not a slave to a god that doesn't exist - Marilyn Manson
I know and it would better value for money. I just also like the fact that it works like an external mobile hard drive. The Xtreamer Pro wasn't far off this price tag either.
Xtreamer Pro - Order Online
Or this but it only takes 2.5" drives Xtreamer Multimedia Player
Help
I upgraded to the latest firmware and it's no longer playing video files
I fixed it by reverting to firmware 1.17Was going to bring it into Asus Sandton but I did get it working.
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