All the time. On the mac it automatically accesses your Movies folder and you can play anything you throw in it (m2t, wmv, divx, Video_TS, etc.) even aliases to media on other drives. For example, you can connect a Firestore to your computer, throw an alias to the media into your Movies folder, and play instant dailies to a HDTV or projector in a completely different room.

I have a 100BaseT router and I've never had any issues with throughput.

1 set of HD baluns over CAT5...$200.

A few hundred more and you're streaming from the editing workstation, directly to the display...that's cool! Thing is, I need a new DVD player :-)

Well Tim, we'll see how it does on our network in about 3 days :-)

We finally got the unit working on our network and here's a few thoughts.

1. The manual isn't all that great, and for network streaming using Windows Media sharing (now a part of WMP11) as well as the included streaming server software, plan to spend a lot of time tinkering. The support forum for this product reflects a lot of user frustration.

2. Plan on network connecting the unit and checking for firmware updates 3 or 4 times...they come consecutively. The online firmware updates are slick.

3. Raw HDV footage from the XH-A1 will not stream from the network and play smoothly. There is a feature in the advanced software streaming software that will re-encode/buffer the footage at a lower bit rate..but it's lower bitrate. The manual indicates max 19Mbps (without transcoding) over a network and that's probably correct.

4. From a USB 2 hard drive enclosure connected to the unit's USB port, the raw HDV footage plays flawlessly! The unit only reads fat32 formatted drives, which are limited in windows XP in size. This litle tool: http://www.crapcontrol.com/e107_file...at32format.zip formatted a 120 GB drive in 1 large fat32 partition under Windows XP Pro. I have no problem with dropping raw HDV to the USB 2.0 drive enclosure for screening. That's way quicker than buring HD to a standard DVD for screening.

5. Windows Media HD files encoded at max bit rate (10Mbps) played flawlessy streamed over the network.

6. Standard DVD .vob files played flawlessly over the network encoded at 9Mbps. This is a nice feature for screening encoded footage before burning any DVDs.

7. The unit's ability to access photos and music files is a nice little bonus as you can play tracks directly from the host computer/s (it will recognize any that have the Streaming software installed), and it displays stills at HD res.

So overall, a bit flaky, but nevertheless a great way to get HD to your monitor on a network connected device.

I got the I/O data latest version of this and it plays divx encoded TV shows flawlessly. I wonder how to make the m2p files burnt on DVD to playback on I/O data version.