HP Media Streamer Upgrades, Video Support

HP has put some work into the fledgling HP Media Streamer application, finally adding support for videos and even beefing up the music section by adding things like album art. 

The big change is the addition of video streaming. Before, the HP Media Streamer appliation let you remotely log in to your MediaSmart Server and stream audio and photos.  In 2.5, HP has upgraded the Media Streamer to support video content as well. Simply fire up your web browser and watch videos. 

How well this feature works largely depends on the upload speed of your home web connection, as well as the available download bandwidth available in your remote location. If both are good, you shouldn't have any problems streaming mobile quality video to your PC. Fortunately, it does buffer the video content, so you can always leave it paused for a few minutes if your connection slows.

I had moderate success streaming videos using both Firefox and IE8, though I encountered some strange issues navigating for video content. In my tests, full quality encodes using the HP video encoder ended up in the music tab. It played just fine with the mobile quality versions. Your mileage may vary, so drop a note in the comments if you're seeing this, too.

iStream App for iPhone

Much of the reason HP has been putting in so much effort on media features was for this, iStream. It's a free app now available from the iTunes App store letting you stream music, photos, and videos from your MediaSmart Server to your iPhone over 3G or Wi-Fi.

It's a huge feature. So big, in fact, that we've gone all out and prepared a separate in-depth review of iStream!

Private Photo Albums in Photo Viewer

It's no secret I'm a bit sour on the loss of Photo Webshare from the first generation MediaSmart Server, which was stripped in favor of the simpler HP Photo Viewer. At least one of the complaints I had in my original EX-485/487 review has been 'somewhat' appeased, thanks in part to addition of private albums in 2.5. 

The first iteration of Photo Viewer only offered public albums, so anyone that happened to stumble across your Home Server could browse and download your precious memories. Kind of creepy... I know. Now you can mark albums as private, which won't appear on the photo album page. 

Albums marked as private will only be accessible by direct URL, meaning you'd need to send someone a link to the private album for them to see it. It's unlikely someone would be able to randomly stumble across your private photo album...

Or is it? Part of the reason I'm only "somewhat" appeased is that your cousin may not realize those party pictures of you passed out drunk are intended to be private, then forward off that link to Grandma. Or worse, could publish that link in a public forum somewhere and anyone could view it.

Still, it's better than nothing, but I'd still recommend not posting anything you wouldn't want 'just anybody' looking at.

Other Notable Features and Improvements

That pretty much covers the major changes in 2.5, but HP has thrown in a few other little things for good measure. 

Time Machine Update

HP has "made a number of improvements to the Mac Backup feature, including the ability to resize the backup disk." This reviewer isn't on a Mac, so we'll have to wait for our resident Mac guy to sink his teeth into 2.5 before I can give you a better impression of what's new and improved. 

TwonkyMedia

HP says they have fixed a number of TwonkyMedia server issues, including the case where songs would not play all the way through. I've had other issues with Twonky in the past, and pretty much gave up on it after PP2 added MP4 support to Windows Media Library Sharing. Still, we ran a few Twonky tests to see if any songs wouldn't play all the way through, and all seemed well. Notice any other fixes? Let us know what you've discovered in the comments area.

Media Collector Status

We touched a bit on this above, but in case you missed it, the Media Collector Status Tool displays information about the most recent media collection. It will show you a status if it's in progress, complete, partially completed, or if there was a failure.

You can only access the Collector Status from the Contol Center on the specific PC, so you can't see all clients from one spot. It also doesn't display history or cumulative media collection results, which means you'll only get a snapshot for the last attempt by the media collector. 

Final Thoughts 

HP has packed quite a bit into a single update, and as you can see, 2.5 is very focused on media capabilities that extend well beyond what the Home Server OS provides. That's probably a good thing, too. As more competition enters the home server space, like the cheaper, Intel Atom based multi-bay Home Servers hitting the scene, HP needs something to differentiate the MediaSmart Server line. Their hardware platform is certainly more powerful than an Atom solution, but until now the extra power wasn't really being put to good use. In the long run, it's the extra features like HP Video Converter, Media Streamer, and iStream that will keep HP's MediaSmart solution at the top of the home server heap.

2.5 is a solid update that adds numerous new abilities to your Media Smart Server, particularly if you are an iPhone owner or consider yourself to be a novice user.  Power users may feel a little less excited about some of the new media features, given the lack of any flexibility. However, the advanced user could still find many of the new features useful, especially if it lets you finally offload home movie transcoding duties to a spouse. With any luck, HP will figure out how to keep features flexible enough for power users while trying to attract the novice masses with simple-stupid, no-fuss automatic solutions.

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