HP MediaSmart Server EX490/EX495

The EX490 series is HP’s latest upgrade in the MediaSmart server family. This new line up can be almost twice as fast, thanks to an Intel dual-core Celeron at 2.5Ghz. That’s quite an upgrade from the previous 2.0Ghz single-core Celeron. That upgrade alone makes the media conversion and compression about twice as fast as it used to be last year. It also frees up cycles for important background tasks. That is no small feat as users store more and more HD content on their media servers. The encoding is now more flexible, with more options. DVDs can be encoded in one or more clips, and the web interface has been improved and made more consistent.

On the management side, the media collector is more customizable: users can designate directories from which the content is pulled from (instead of the few default directories), that was something that we’ve been waiting for since the last upgrade. MediaSmart is becoming more and more Mac-friendly, but as of now, you still need a PC for the first configuration. The good news is that you can now do a “full metal recovery” (restore everything) on Mac OS X. If you already own a MediaSmart Server, HP won’t let you hang dry. Some of the new features will make it to the older hardware, but you will have to do a full re-install. Product page