Recently, I have been trying to make use of the add-in FIREPLAY which allows me to play music remotely (and locally) from my MSS. Excellent Idea, but in the attempt to make FirePlay work, I discovered that there is an interesting mix of Media Content Services (assuming I have even identified them all) and, well, in my case, there were/are not all configured or turned on or even working for that matter. Problem is, that I frankly do not even understand what all of the services are and how they relate or depend or ignore each other. So....... my big question is ... can someone please explain what these services are and how they perhaps interact with each other. In particular, I was under the impression that Twonky fed Firefly and perhaps the HP Media Streamer, but experience indicates this does not appear to be so. So what is twonky for? No clue ....

Just to touch the iceberg, I have identified:
Firefly
FirePlay (which is an add-on)
Twonky
HP Media Streamer
HP Video Converter
HP Media Collector
HP Photo Publisher
HP Photo Viewer
Itunes Server or Service?
Media Sharing
Remote Access (needed for some of the above to work).

to the best of my knowledge:


Firefly - streams music to iTunes, provides many advanced features re: streaming to iTunes ...
(http://hpserver:9999 user:admin pass:firefly)

Twonky - DLNA media server, streams many formats to many Digital Media Receivers, ie. PS3/XBOX360/X280N, feeds HP MediaStreamer

HP MediaSreamer (aka MediaWebStreamer) - An HP flash based web-app which provides a nice interface for streaming audio/video over the web. The only compatible formats MP3, AAC-LC, PCM (in wma, mp3, m4a, mp4, aac, wav containers), as well as the MP4/.H264 AAC video that has been processed by HP VideoConverter (or manually moved to the required folders)


HP VideoConverter - transcoding of videos to MP4/.H264 (for iPhone streaming, web streaming via mp4)

HP MediaCollector - a simple program that scans your hard drive(s) for media files .. indexes the files and feeds them to Firefly

HP PhotoPublisher/HP Photo Viewer: A flash-based web-app which provides a nice interface for "publishing" and allowing viewing of Photos

Media Sharing: the default DLNA streamer for Windows Media Center & many DMRs. The reason you also get Twonky, is because Twonky is slightly more powerful and supports more DMRs.

FirePlay - an add-in which mimics the functionality of HP MediaStreamer (I haven't tried this, so I don't know whether it's better or worse)

"Remote Access" The part of the interface that lets you configure how you access the web pages on your server across the network.

"iTunes server or service" - the part of the interface that lets you configure basic Twonky settings in console

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