Asus O!Play Live

We bought an Asus O!Play Live after seeing a handful of reviews that said the media player was decent. Asus products are normally manufactured well and function better than many other brands, so we figured that buying from Asus was safe. We ended up returning it after a day to get a Roku 2 XD.

While the Asus box has a lot of features, the firmware seems to have been rushed as half of them don't work or barely work. The device becomes extremely slow after twenty minutes of use. I'm not sure how other users were able to use the box at all as ours became completely unusable after this point. You have to click a button on the remote three or four times before the box registers, and then it takes forever to proceed to the next menu.

When setting up media streaming from a server, it would only read the UPnP servers after letting it sit for five to ten minutes. There was no real interface for this; if streaming music it would switch to an ugly media player with no organization ability whatsoever. When you have a library of 1000 songs, it's impossible to use. Plex would work except that the device could barely register the existence of a Plex server.

There are no firmware updates and the box will simply tell you that it can't connect to the network even though it's completely capable of connecting. ASUS isn't doing much to support it either, probably because it's, well, a garbage product.

Maybe ours was just bad, but somehow I doubt it. The unresponsive menus were what did it. Otherwise it would have at least been usable.

It's too expensive for these kind of usability issues, with a price tag of $115.