Talking about HP’s MediaSmart Home Servers always reminds us what a huge opportunity Apple is missing out on by not offering a competing product for Apple users. A Mini-Xserve or Jumbo Time Capsule with these capabilities shouldn’t be hard to produce and would be a big hit in our opinion. But let’s get to the details of how HP is eating Apple’s cake.
HP’s latest MediaSmart Servers, the ex487 and ex485 (only – the older ones don’t have the horsepower), now have the capability to stream videos over the LAN or over the Internet to your iPhone or iPod touch. The server automatically takes your media files and in the background gets to converting them into smaller H.264 format for speedy optimized file transfers. The original files can be AVI (DivX, XviD, MJPEG), MOV, DVR-MS, MPEG-2, MP4, MPEG-4, WMV and unprotected DVD VOB.
The servers come with one hard drive but allow you to insert up to three additional hard drives for almost 8TB of total storage (with 2TB drives).
While the files don’t work natively on the iPhone (strange?), they will with help from HP’s upcoming iStream application (if it gets accepted). HP’s servers also support streaming to many other file types for other devices.
HP is also improving its already solid Time Machine backup interface and capabilities in this latest release. HP won a Macworld 2009 award for this product earlier this year.
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