Playback
This section is going to be a case of the good, the bad, and the ugly when looking at video and audio playback.
The good: Online streaming, such as Netflix, Youtube, and Google Play, is smooth as butter and the Asus Cube seems to have no trouble streaming reliably over both Ethernet and wireless. With local media on an NTFS formatted drive, various 720p and 1080p files played with no hesitation. On the music side of things, both FLAC and 320kpbs MP3 files played without a hitch.
The bad: The interface can take a while to populate with everything on your network shares. Transitioning between folders is more of the same, especially when going back to a main folder with lots of subfolders.
The ugly: I tried to test out a lot of different formats and resolutions for locally streamed media. For video, nearly every 1080p file I have failed to start over the network, including both .mkv and .AVI files. 720p was a bit better story, but the video quite often got stuck and buffered for a few seconds at a time, even after raising the amount of cache the app could use. I could not get a single music file to show up from my Windows shared folders.
The next test was local streaming using Plex (DLNA). While my music was recognized, I could not get a single file to start playing. Video was an even scarier situation, where attempting to start many of my videos ended up in the Asus Cube either failing to start playback or flat out locking up. The good thing is that the restart button came in handy during these tests!
