Hewlett Packard DMR-EW5000 Digital Media Receiver for Windows PCs

Hewlett Packard DMR-EW5000 Digital Media Receiver for Windows PCs

Product Description
Product Description:
Extend the reach of your home PCs� make the most of digital entertainment. Your home PC is the perfect place to create, edit and organize all your digital entertainment content like music and photos, but it's hard to enjoy that entertainment fully - and share the moment with family and friends - when you're stuck in front of the computer. The solution is the HP Digital Media Receiver. It allows you to make the most of the digital music and photos that are stored on your home-networked PCs and then enjoy that entertainment content from elsewhere in the house.

Hewlett Packard DMR-EW5000 Digital Media Receiver for Windows PCs
Average customer rating:

More junk from HP

Very poor network reliability.

For the love of god, avoid this product!

Worked - Sometimes

Very good, works great.

Hewlett Packard DMR-EW5000 Digital Media Receiver for Windows PCs

Manufacturer: Hewlett Packard
ProductGroup: CE
Binding: Electronics

Receivers & Amplifiers | Audio & Video | Categories | Electronics | Combo Receivers | Component Amplifiers | Home Theater Receivers | Stereo Receivers
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Accessories:

NETGEAR Wireless Digital Music Player

PRISMIQ MediaPlayer

Product Features:

Wireless digital media receiver provides interface between PC and connected stereo and TV

User-friendly interface automatically gathers music and pictures from multiple networked PCs

Connections: 802.11b Wireless LAN; standard 802.3 Wired LAN 10 Base-T Ethernet interface; analog audio left & right out; composite video out; S-video out

Supports music formats: MP3 and WMA, plus import of M3U, PLS and RMP playlists; image formats: JPG, GIF, BMP and PNG

Supports 64-bit and 128-bit encryption supported, ad hoc and infrastructure modes

ASIN: B00008VGRS

Product Description

Extend the reach of your home PCs? make the most of digital entertainment. Your home PC is the perfect place to create, edit and organize all your digital entertainment content like music and photos, but it's hard to enjoy that entertainment fully - and share the moment with family and friends - when you're stuck in front of the computer. The solution is the HP Digital Media Receiver. It allows you to make the most of the digital music and photos that are stored on your home-networked PCs and then enjoy that entertainment content from elsewhere in the house.

Customer Reviews:

More junk from HP.......2004-06-05

HP continues to live off their printer reputation by engineering over-priced products that are riddled with bugs and incompatibility issues. I spend most of my time manually unplugging the set from the power supply because the system continually wigs out and locks up, and removing the power cable is the only way to reset it. Their search feature is archaic at best. What they don't tell you is that this device can only read certain bit/sampling rates. If you've copied your CDs using the Windows Media Player's WMA Lossless format the songs will not play on this device. By an XP computer and use the Windows Media Player with a good sound card and you'll be much happier and have a lot more functionality.

Very poor network reliability........2004-02-13

The box seems incapable of handling any network unreliability which can happen in a wireless network. If I shutdown my WAP, the connection to the server is lost, but when I bring it back up the EW5000 does not reestablish the connection--you either have to power cycle or re-apply the network settings in the config menu.
Secondly, the unit has a tendency to get behind on button presses from the remote. When accessing things on the network, the user interface hangs until it is complete. Then all those button presses are processed. My unit has had a tendency to hang(requiring power cycling)--especially when I make the network unreliable by walking near the unit with my cordless phone(2.4Ghz). The unit also seems a bit deaf. I get 60% only 15 feet away from my WAP. My laptop gets full strength signals all over the house including downstairs. HP, to their credit, is sending me a no-hassle replacement, but they didn't sound to hopeful that anything significant will change. The support team, however, spent a great deal of time with me to try to solve the problem. I give them very high marks. Oh yes, in case you are wondering, I did update the firmware to the latest release. It helped slightly, but did not fix the problems.

On the other hand, when it works, it is a nice unit. Easy to choose the music, pictures, etc. A nice feature is to assign a music play list to a photo album. Also, when making changes on the PC, the unit seems to pick up the changes without rebooting. The song title/info is in a small font. I wish that they would display the song in the screen saver instead of the HP logo.
The only major drawback is that you need to serve the files from a Windows PC. You cannot use Linux/Samba or any open standard file sharing system. I was thinking of adding a network harddisk to my network. This is no longer an option. I notice that Sony is also using a proprietary solution for their network server. I was also surprised that I could not control the unit via a web page.

I currently own a TurtleBeach Audiotron which is a far more robust and versatile unit. If it had a TV interface for music selection I would not even consider the EW5000 which is a toy by comparison.

For the love of god, avoid this product!.......2004-01-03

I bought this wireless media device early last year. The other reviews were right. It does not play consistently, the wireless link randomly goes up and down, and it hangs my pc as it attempts to index the media files.

I just checked HP's website and they do not have a firmware update for the media device nor an update for the server software for the PC. Run, don't walk back to the store and return this useless piece of junk.

Worked - Sometimes.......2004-01-01

I have read a few bad reviews of this product, but I had to verify it for myself. I added the media receiver to my existing wireless network. The unit was placed about 15-20ft (through 1 wall and around 1 corner)from the access point. Upon initial setup of the software it was unable to connect to the router. After repositioning the media receiver (2-3 feet closer to the router and standing the unit on its side)it was able to locate my router. It played for about 2 minutes then lost connection again. I then updated the firmware, which was supposed to improve wirless performance of the device, unfortunately after the update it seemed worse! It took about a dozen tries before finding my server, and after it was up and running, it would drop signal after only a few minutes. I know my wireless network is not at fault because I use a laptop that is double the distance of the media receiver and it gets a good signal. This device may be ok if you are going to use it wired, but for wireless systems, I would wait a while until these type of products become further developed. It seems HP released these way too soon, and possably with inferior hardware!

Very good, works great........2003-12-31

I bought this a couple weeks ago and got it hooked up to my Linksys wireless network quickly with no problems.

I even have Panasonic 2.4 ghz wireless phones and there appears to be no intereference between the ew5000 and the phones.

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