Been playing around with the Media Player provided with OS 2008 and noticed that it has a UPnP capability built in, so I thought I would give it a whirl with the TVersity and Twonky Media Servers that I have installed on my Win XP PC. (If UPnP servers are running on your local network, they just appear in Media Player, Library list)

I would like to say that it works fine if not better than Nokia provided UPnP Media Streamer application that can be installed on OS 2006 & 2007.

Unfortunately this is NOT The case. The Media Player Application see the servers fine and we can gradually (Very slowly) traverse the available media and commence to play a selected track, unfortunately once playing a track successfully the Media player program becomes unresponsive and actually hangs like a windows application i.e. "library is not responding, do you want to close player?"

This problem occurs with either Twonky or TVersity so imagine problem will occur with any UPnP Service and a large Library of Media.

More work required Nokia, also it does not support album Art, which was the case with Media streamer when using Twonky as my Media server?

Oh and finally what's with the boring white interface of the latest Media Player Nokia, why can't it be themed like the OS? (Can't find out version as there is no About option in Media Player in Beta OS 2008)

It's unfortunate as I do believe a lot of work has been done on the OS 2008 Media Player behind the scenes to improve it, cant put my finger on it but I just don't like it, oh wait, Canola Beta 2 is just around the corner

PS Please accept my comments as positive feedback on this application as I do believe there is a need for the "basic provided Media player package" to be as good as Nokia can make it.

Do any of the videos play locally, if transferred to the memory card?

I just tried streaming a video encoded using the tablet-encode perl script from a uShare server, and it worked fine for me.

It did use more CPU, but didn't max it out.

Reported as a bug in Bugzilla. "OS 2008 Media Player, Unresponsive/Freezes when using UPnP" Bug 2509

New Media player plays, Music and Video fine locally.

The Media Player freezing and becoming unresponsive seems to relate to UPnP activities and the browsing of larger libraries that are served by UPnP Services, tested with Twonky & TVersity where condition is repeatable.