There are so many digital storage solutions available today, which product do I purchase plus the constant push for more disk capacity at a lower cost so the drive you use today is most likely gone tomorrow. The competitive cost conscious public sacrafices reliability for savings and so many products suffer from this unfortunately at the loss of all your media content, it takes months of using a new drive to only realize the web is plagued with unhappy people that have had constant problems with specific drive manufactures and that they experienced major failures that tossed all of their data content into oblivion. So it’s very important to do as much research as possible before purchasing a product that simply does not perform well. 

One product that we recommend is by Synology Network. The Synology Network attached storage system provides a solid disk management hardware platform to build your own NAS. It features extensive management tools and it’s DLNA certified. Using Western Digital Caviar Black hard drives has proven very reliable, these drives provide High performance (sustained peak 138MB/s), high reliability, cutting edge technology and a 5-year limited warranty it is the ideal drive for those who demand only the best.  

It’s always important to have a solid backup solution for your content. Hours and hours are spent loading and organizing your content to simply leave it in the fate of a single drive. You can use a Raid setup for a NAS or use the xLobby Sync technology to backup your content between drives.

Western Digital Caviar Black  Hard Drive 

Synology Website: http://www.synology.com/us/products/DS211j/index.php

Western Digital Website: http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=100

Synology Model: DS211J

Synology Model DS411

This news post is subject to changes and updates.

Wes Black

The current bleeding edge release of xLobby now has a native Android xPad application that works with xLobby’s webserver system.  The new start page menu has two options, 1. Connect, connects the device to xLobbys webserver main page menu or 2. Settings, the new setup menu on the start page of the application is for entering the webserver IP location, xLobby Port, optional password feature to keep users out of settings. If connection is lost to the android device, the connecting screen with ip address and port locations are shown. Note the IP address goes only in this field and the port location goes only in the port field.

The new xLobby Native Android xPad system has many improvements over the older origional xPad webserver for android.

1. Faster interface, improved performance

2. Supports Landscape, Portrait modes more efficiently

3. (Future Support) for IP control devices directly without xLobby’s PC based OS or hardware

4. (Future Support) for Playback audio directly from a xLobby systems music library for local device audio playback

5. (Future Support) for Speech recognition directly from the tablet to xLobby control hardware, use your voice to control xLobby.

6. (Flat license fee) for system integrators, use as many iPad, iPod, Android devices on the xPad webserver system as needed.

xLobbys new xPad, Native Android control system

Some future possibilities

xLobby Setup menu, Webserver settings screenshot

Android Screenshots

Android native applicaton, (Splash Screen)

Android Native application, (Settings Screen)

Android Native application, (Settings Screen)

This new platform will continue to expand, monitor your xLobby bleeding edge updates + updates from the native application for improvements, bug fixes and additional features, they will be available on an ongoing basis, stay tuned for continued news updates on the xLobby website.

The Android Native Application download is available at: http://www.xlobby.com/xlobbyandroid.apk

This news post is subject to changes and updates.

Wes Black

A few new features, bug fixes are listed below.

1. Builtin Screen Saver for xLobby that will provide a slide show of either a  Blank screen or images from xLobby’s picture, movie libraries with idle activation time settings none, 1 min, 5min, or anytime frame you want to set it for. The screen saver wakes up on mouse, keyboard, IR, RS232 navigation commands.

2. Bug in auto backups (old auto backups are deleted eventually to save space).

3. Spider for google movie covers changed to look for movie posters (more accurate results that way, and posters give a different look).

4. Misc. ipad interface fixes.

5. Improvements on Client Server syncing.

The native Android support xLobby’s xPad webserver system for Android will be released within the next few weeks.

Wes Black