Anyone using Philips Streamium?

[spg]

Philips has what looks to be some pretty cool audio hardware that can play internet radio and Mp3s off of your PC -

http://www.streamium.com

I've got a MC-i250 wireless mini-system on order with Amazon, supposed to ship next week (been backordered for a couple weeks), so once I get it I will post what I think of the system. Anyone else here using any Streamium hardware?

[spg]

Well, I got my system this morning and excitedly opened it up to get it "quickly" setup. After a while I realized the quickly idea wasn't going to work. First of, this is a really cool unit. Unfortunetly, setup was a little difficult. I had to assign the wifi connection an IP address (couldn't seem to get one from DHCP), and then had a whale of a time getting the MusicMatch software to communicate from my tablet to the stereo. After several hours of tinkering, I've finally gotten everything working, although I'm still on a static IP. The communication problem turned out to be stupidity on my part, combined with Windows XP SP2 beta. With all the new security features in the beta, I never did quite disable the right one to let the stereo communicate. Took me a while to figure it out, but after getting it working on my XP Pro desktop I was able to get it working from the Tablet PC.

I must say though, despite the problems, I really like this unit so far. The bass is surprisingly good, and the internet radio and Mp3 playback features are just plain cool. I'm not sure I would reccomend this unit to just anyone yet, the setup needs to be alot easier before the average person would be able to get it to work I think.

I must admit the "cool" factor is my big draw to this unit, and I was very pleased when I heard a song on internet radio earlier and was able to quickly press "Info" on the remote and a few seconds later got an e-mail in my inbox with the CD information. 8) And the nifty thing is, all this can work without a computer, just as a standalone stereo. Of course you wouldn't get the same Mp3 features that way, but the internet radio and everything else would still work great.

Overall, I'd give this thing a 1 day rating of 3 out of 5, although it is alot higher on the "cool" scale. I'm thinking about getting a subwoofer to go with it, although I wasn't expecting the bass to be as good as it is. Anyway... just some cool digital audio hardware here for you.

[Suhit Gupta]

That is a little weird that it won't pick up a dynamic address. I wonder how that will affect people that don't have the ability to give out static addresses, i.e. don't have broadband routers or some such.

Suhit

[spg]

Yeah, I have no idea why it wouldn't work. The router could see the stereo (looked it up by MAC address), but the stereo never acknowledged that it had an IP.

[Suhit Gupta]

Yeah, and the FAQ or support pages have no information on this subject AFAICT. Perhaps it is time to call them.

Suhit