Learn How to Leverage Firefly Media Server to Playback Your HP MediaSmart Server’s Stored Music Collection via the Internet
By Alexander Grundner |
October 8th, 2008
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If you’ve ever been interested in learning how to access and playback your HP MediaSmart Server’s stored music collection from any web enabled device, the following how-to guide at MediaSmart Home does a fairly good job of explaining how to go about doing this. The guide shows you how to enable and configure Firefly Media Server for remote access (delves into port forwarding, firewall settings, etc.) and introduces you to Firefly’s playback add-in, FirePlay (requires Flash). The catch to this setup, of course, is it can only stream DRM-free music tracks. On the plus side, Firefly provides on-the-fly transcoding of OGG, FLAC, Apple Lossless, and WMA to MP3 and can sift through your iTunes library and even read playlists. [via]
Like most of you — I’m guessing — I was not familiar with Firefly Media Server or FirePlay, so I did a little digging around. Here’s what I found:
The main site for Firefly Media Server is: http://www.fireflymediaserver.org/
MediaSmartServer.net Wiki – FirePlay
Bo Mellberg has developed a Flash Add-In for Firefly called FirePlay[1] that allows you to stream music directly from your browser, including a Nintendo Wii.
Firefly installs it’s own web server, Apache. So as well as IIS (where the Remote Access pages are hosted from), you also have an Apache Web Server. Choosing where to install FirePlay is down to personal choice, whether you want to put your admin password in each time, or not.
MediaSmartServer.net Wiki – Fireplay Media Server
One of the selling points of the MSS is that it comes with, out of the box, the ability to act as an iTunes server. This is something of a misnomer. First, the Firefly server is an open-source project not related to HP at all and certainly not supported. Also, the Firefly server only streams non-DRM content, and only music. It will not stream iTunes-purchased content, photos, or movies. This makes it pretty useless, IMO.Firefly will, however, allow you to stream your music content via its web interface to the Internet. Thus you could listen to your music from work, streaming it from your MSS. This, in my opinion, is the only benefit of Firefly.
Anyone who wants to use their MSS as a digital content server with ATV will want to use iTunes.
Tags: Firefly Media Server, HP MediaSmart Server
Filed in: Digital Media Servers, Software