Over the past few days I’ve been enjoying the lovely ASUS O!Play BDS-700 media player and it has been an interesting experience. To start with I had to get this baby installed in my already technology stuffed lounge and this turned out to be no easy task…
Inside the box of the ASUS O!Play BDS-700 media player you get a composite cable, a power cable and very little else (excluding the remote and included batteries, of course). The first problem I hit was the two-pin plug. This is not a flaw in the provided cables with the BDS-700, obviously, but rather my lack of adaptors. Fortunately my sadly geeky collection of kettle plugs provided me with a solution to that problem.
If you are going to invest in this lovely piece of kit, then I do recommend your investing in both a UK-designed kettle plug and an HDMI cable. There isn’t an HDMI cable included in the box with the ASUS O!Play BDS-700 media player and it is far better to have one of these overall for quality. I simply pillaged the HDMI cable from my Xbox…
It honestly didn’t take long for me to put the O!Play BDS-700 media player into my pile of goodies lurking beside my TV. What I really like about the process so far is that anyone can do it, you don’t need to be a geek or technology nut to figure out how to put the BDS-700 in the start position.
Once the cables had all been plugged in and settled neatly into place, it was time to tune the BDS-700 to match my set. The Quick Start instructions that come inside the O!Play’s box give you a visual idea on how to achieve this goal. I have a knack for cables and slots and figuring out connectivity but when it comes to tuning, I can be something of a slow mover. My brain doesn’t like it.
So how did it go?
Not very well. We have a fairly old Sony HDTV that hangs around at 720p. The ASUS O!Play BDS-700 menu was inaccessible because the screen was a blur – the O!Play was set to 1080p which is completely incompatible and as a result I couldn’t even access the menu to reset it to 720p. I stared at the TV for a bit, poked around the remote, Googled troubleshooting problems, and realised that there was no way to get the BDS-700 to work using the HDMI cable.
I then used the composite cable. Hopefully this was going to get me into the menu so I could reset the BDS-700 media player to 720p. It did. In composite mode I got the settings to the right level for HDMI – the O!Play was set to Auto and as it detected it was an HDTV it automatically chose 1080p, not realising that this TV was just too tired for such a thing – and switched back to the HDMI cable.
Sorted. The O!Play is now installed and ready to be tested in a variety of different ways. Next up is a chat about how it plays…