Category: Techtoday
I remember an old friend telling me in 2001 that you don't need a DVD player, Blu-Ray player, or any other type of player when you can watch whatever media you have with your laptop. Well, it turned out he wasn't very prophetic with optical drives being slowly removed from portables and players/streamers more popular than ever. I shared an Xtreamer Sidewinder video streamer with my partner for a year, watching movies and videos before I flew off overseas for work. Deprived of any sort of entertainment short of the Internet and the movies/TV shows I had on my portable Toshiba hard drive, I was forced to watch shows like Game of Thrones and Terminator: the Sarah Connors Chronicles on my 13.3" Lenovo Ideapad and 11" ASUS EEEPC 1000H for seven months. The sad part is the fully-furnished apartment I was renting came with a cheap, generic, 42-inch HDTV widescreen. It didn't have an HDMI port (which prevented me from connecting my laptop) and was manufactured by an unknown Chinese company, but it was torture seeing it everyday and not having a media streamer to watch Thor or The Incredible Hulk on the darn thing. I left it unplugged and quiet for months (believe me, after one month of CCTV you would, too!).
Now, with the multitude of media devices like the Western Digital WD TV Live and Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex HD media player available in Xujahui, why didn't I just buy one and enjoy my huge display? Well, obviously, I'm a cheap bastard and I foresaw that I'd probably be working elsewhere in a year or two so I'd be soon deprived of a TV once again and be weighed down by a media player (travelling and living overseas are two different things).
And then I got to try one of the ASUS O!Play Media Players at my apartment for a few days.
Ok, so it was an old model and had firmware problems - the subtitles of the anime El-Hazard and Will Ferrell's Casa de mi Padre didn't display. Although I couldn't access any online services such as YouTube, Vimeo, or Netflix due to the Great Firewall, the O!Play was quickly able to read and catalog the media files stored on my 1TB Buffalo DriveStation. The Xtreamer always took its time when reading from a large storage disk but the O!Play suffered no such lag. The media player also connected immediately to my Ubuntu and openSUSE SAMBA shares and ran all my (ahem) downloaded videos without any codecs issues. And yes, because my dinky HDTV screen didn't have an HDMI port I was stuck using RCA cables, but the quality was several times better than on my laptop (and it was huge). I was thoroughly distracted by Dakota Fanning's short skirt in Push, saw quite clearly how too old Tobey Maguire was for playing Peter Parker way back in Spider-Man, and practically choked on Don Draper's cigarette. For two days, I blissfully watched Cap and Hulk knock down bad guys on The Avengers: Earth's Mighiest Heroes. I'm not a videophile or audiophile by any stretch of the imagination and without 7.1 speakers I wasn't getting the full multimedia experience, but in comparison to watching movies and videos using my laptop and netbook, the O!Play and HDTV combination was heaven.
When Monday arrived, I returned the O!Play and came home to the HDTV - which was now once again unplugged and silent. I returned to watching True Blood on my Ideapad. Two days later, I was suffering from withdrawal symptoms and admitted that even though I might end up moving again soon, I might as well take advantage of my big display by getting a media player. Preferably a small one like the ASUS O!Play or WD TV Live.
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