Although still in beta, the new firmware sounds promising. I installed the beta-firmware yesterday and have not noticed anything not working. Surprisingly network transfer is faster (I attribute this to a new version of Samba).
The new Media Server supports many more video formats (ISO, MKV, M4V, MOV etc) and Apple users will be excited about the out-of-the box Time Machine support.
A full list of the new features after the break.
- New DLNA Compliant Media Server: Supports streaming music, photo and video. Supports MP3 and M4A metadata (incl. composer, album artwork etc). Additional video formats supported (MKV, TS, M2TS, M2T, MTS, M4V, 3GP, 3G2, QT, SWF, DVR-MS, MOV, TRP, TP, and ISO). On-the-fly transcoding of FLAC, OGG, AAC (.aac, .m4a, .m4b) and AIFF (.aif, .aiff) to WAV or PCM to enjoy high quality lossless music on compatible DMAs.
- iPhone Support: Two new iPhone applications will be published on the Apple® App Store: (1) DS photo allows you to easily upload photos from iPhone/iPod touch to your Disk Station and instantly share it out to the world. (2) DS audio allows you to stream and enjoy the music stored on Disk Station with your iPhone/iPod touch where Internet is available.
- iSCSI: Designate portion of your volume space to be an iSCSI target, and expand it later at your preference. You can assign up to 10 iSCSI targets on each Disk Station.
- Firewall: The built-in firewall function allows you to decide which service or IP address are allowed to access the Disk Station and prevent uninvited connections.
- SNMP: SNMP protocol support allows you to monitor Disk Station with network management softwares.
- Resource Monitor: Resource monitor allows you to easily monitor Disk Station’s CPU usage, memory usage, network flow and volume usage.
- Mac OS X Time Machine Support: Simply choose a destination folder on your Disk Station, and you can easily back up data of your Mac OS to the server.
- SMS Notification: By setting up SMS notification, you will be notified immediately if any critical event occurs on your Disk Station.