ASUS O!Play Air HDP-R3 Adds WiFi-N To 1080p Media Streamer

Back when ASUS announced their O!Play HDP-R1 media streamer in June 2009 we criticized it for leaving out WiFi.  Now the company have launched a new version, and the ASUS O!Play Air HDP-R3 does indeed bring WiFi 802.11n to the table.  The HDP-R3 is capable of playing back local 1080p HD content from attached memory sticks and hard-drives, as well as sucking streaming content over your high-speed wireless network.

Connectivity includes HDMI v1.3, composite audio/video and digital audio outputs, along with a USB 2.0 port and a combo USB 2.0/eSATA port for hooking up external storage.  The new O!Play also has a multiformat memory card reader and wired ethernet port.

Video support is pretty comprehensive, with MPEG1/2/4, H.264, VC-1 and RM/RMVB content supported in a variety of containers (mp4, .mov, .xvid., .avi., .asf, .wmv, .mkv, .rm, .rmvb, .flv, .ts, .m2ts, .dat, .mpg, .vob, .mts, .tp, .trp, .iso); there's also broad audio (MP3, WAV, AAC, OGG, FLAC, AIFF, LPCM, WMA, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS) and image (JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF, TIFF) compatibility.  There's also a dedicated button on the new remote that instantly kicks the mediaplayer into shuffled music playback.  The ASUS O!Play Air HDP-R3 is on sale in Italy now, priced at €129.90 ($178); no word on an international release as yet.