Having invested in the above item, I am delighted that the latest update 2.5 from HP has given me turn key photos, music and video streaming right out of the box, and the cherry on the cake is the free iPhone app that now lets me play all that content on my 3g iphone. This is so cool, I just told it to convert all my ripped movies and poof the mediasmart automatically created a mobile version and I can stream it on my iphone. :) thought you guys might find that interesting.

hi,

mine took for ever to convert the videos... and while doing that it was barely usable as the CPU was almost all the time 100%... how was your experience?

Also, while converting it decided to do some storage balancing and guess what the poor thing could barely go as the cpu was entirely eaten alife by the convertion and the qsm process balancing capacity... HP put a bunch of applications they did not develop and label them as "HP video encoder" (for example) and they are 3rd party apps they install in the box... the problem with this is that they do not interact with each other (i.e. it shouldn't launch a storage balancing while converting video the thing totally hangs and you cannot even launch the console while is doing that).

Also, I was testing the iphone app with my iphone 3G and I was meaning to ask you if you had to mess around with any ports in your router? My iphone displays my whole collection, but when I try to play any song, it doesnt work at all. I was able to play 1 video though. (1 out of all the videos it converted I still dont understand why).

So its not all as good as it sounds...
Now that I have had the hp MS for a couple of weeks... im honestly thinking it would have probably been better to build my own machine with more horse power... you gotta love its foot print small and it just looks cool :)

It did take it's time, but it got through OK, so far it has been streaming all my Music, Photo's and MP4 converted videos. I am going to upgrade the CPU to the Intel E5200 as this should give it more umph that it currently has. All in all as a turn key solution I like it and still think it deserves its own thread as it has many software addons and hacks that make it worthy. Especially for those folks that have never built a PC.

I love mine for sure. I wanted something quiet with a small footprint and it's exceeded my expectations so far.

ok... after i tweaked IIS, played with some configuration (speciall the time outs) ... now I can stream from remote, both with my iphone 3G and with my laptop... but, its going down often (the remote service), I am not sure why.

I also have a weird error that keeps happening: Firefly, keeps crashing... do you guys experience something similar? I am thinking about getting rid of firefly and just installing itunes in the server and use it to share the library... I've heard of peole enjoying that more, also to stream to the apple TV they have (i dont have one).
i am considering the cpu upgrade as well... .this is defenetely taking a toll on the system

I am thinking about getting rid of firefly and just installing itunes in the server and use it to share the library... I've heard of peole enjoying that more, also to stream to the apple TV they have (i dont have one).

I have used Apple TVs for a few years now. I have three in my house and they work flawlessly. I rip my DVDs to my PC and transfer them to iTunes. And in spite of everyones attempts iTunes is the best there is for managing content IMHO.