HP Announces Video Streaming for MediaSmart Servers to Stream Video, iStream App for iPhone

HP’s next MediaSmart Server software update will enable automatic video conversion and mobile streaming. This means users will be able to playback their movies from any device in full resolution on their home network or at HP is also releasing an iPhone application so MediaSmart EX485 and EX487 owners can access their entire photo, music and video libraries from anywhere.

The new software will convert most popular videos into MPEG4 H.264. Full resolution version MPEG4 videos will be available for playback on users’ home networks, while lower resolution versions will be created for remote streaming. AVI (DivX, Xvid, MJPEG), MOV (MJPEG), DVR-MS (MPEG-2), MP4 (MPEG4), WMV and
unprotected DVD VOB. DVD chapters will be stitched together into a single video file.

iStream will make it easy to access terabytes of your multimedia content from your iPhone. The smaller version converted MPEG4 videos are compact enough to stream smoothly over the iPhone’s 3G connection.
Video conversion is processor intensive, but HP reps explained that the video conversion tool is set to a low priority to make sure it will not get in the way of other tasks, such as backup a and file sharing.

The HP MediaSmart servers will receive the update at the end of April.