Step 2: Testing the Waters

If you have a hard drive or flash based camera, or if your home movies are already in some digital file on your PC, toss one of them in to the Videos folder on your home server. Make sure media sharing is enabled on your server, and try to stream the file to an XBOX 360, MediaSmart Connect, or whatever digital media receiver you use. If it works, then you won't need to worry about creating anything other than a mobile version if you plan on accessing it with your iStream app or remotely using a web browser. 

If it doesn't work, then we'll need to convert it using the HP Video Converter.

Step 3: Converting Videos with the HP Video Converter

Once all your videos are extracted to your hard drive and you know they require further conversion, the next step is to copy video files or the Video TS folder of your home movie DVD to your conversion folder (Videos, or whatever folder you set up). Really, that's it. Just copy and paste it into the shared folder. 

From there, the HP Video Converter goes to work. One by one it will make full quality and/or mobile quality h.264 versions of your home movies and put them in the HQ and MQ folders in "Converted Videos."

You can view the status anytime by clicking "HP Video Converter" in the left hand pane of the MediaSmart Server tab in the Home Server Console. Any files that are incompatible with the HP Video Converter will be listed here.

Once your videos are converted you'll be able to stream them to the XBOX 360, MediaSmart Connect, and other compatible digital media receivers. If you've also elected to make mobile quality versions, then you'll be able to view them in a web browser using the HP Media Streamer app or on your iPhone using the free iStream app.

Performance

Encoding video is a resource intensive task, but you won't find that it negatively affects your Server's performance. Video encoding is relegated to the lowest priority task you can assign it, meaning that encoding will take place in the background when it has spare cycles. 

The HP MediaSmart Server isn't exactly a power house, so it will take time for video encodes to complete. 

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