Cheap Hewlett Packard DMR-EW5000 Digital Media Receiver for Windows PCs (Electronics) Price

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Customer Reviews of Hewlett Packard DMR-EW5000 Digital Media Receiver for Windows PCs

More junk from HP
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.

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Very poor network reliability.
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.

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For the love of god, avoid this product!
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.