Quote:
Originally Posted by streamerlover /forum/post/21523930
So, am I the only sucker to order one of these things?
Looks good but there are a few things about this player I would like ironed out real soon, especially in light of recent developments on the Oppo front making me want to get a BDP-93 right away.
If it has a licensed BD drive in it, whats to stop the BDA license people from asking them to remove ISO support in the future as they have done with Oppo.
I am pretty sure its a licensed drive as ASUS makes BD drives for PCs and they come with their laptops as well so we know the company is licensed even if you hadnt heard of ASUS before.
3D BD ISO's have been reported to peak at bitrates higher than 50Mb/s so will USB 2.0 really do in this regard and is that why Oppo also included an eSATA port on thier models which this one doesnt have ?
For those people wanting to stream over the LAN, better have an enterprise-class Cisco switch if you want to get BD ISO playback [let alone 3D] as this device only has a 100Mb NIC port onboard.
As far as it being a likely Oppo clone, they definitely got the design idea from there as well as the idea to use the Marvell chip but the internal board layout is markedly different just based on the back port layouts.
If you read the Russian-translated review, you will see that there is no way they could offer it for a lower price than the Oppo just based on the quality of the chips handling all the different tasks.
I just checked the eBay prices and the BDP-93 is only US$20 more than the 700 version of this player which is its closest technical counterpart so its just a toss-up on whether you want to get this one or the Oppo.
FWIW, the HiMedia H900x series players have firmware that is pretty much the same size as this ASUS player. [175MB F/W dl]
This would imply that the ASUS player s/w is definitely based on a Linux OS as opposed to the Oppo F/W which is around half that size.
This also has the added advantage that if ISO support was removed in the future, it could be added back in by extracting, modifying and then re-compiling the f/w the same way someone on the futeko forum demonstrated could be done with the HiMedia devices.
Dont know about the veracity of the Marvell inferiority comment, especially since the holy-of-holies Oppo's uses an earlier version of the same chipset, however, the person making a comment has a solid rep.