It looks like it must have been some sort of issue on CloudEngine's server (being unable to tell if I was local or remote) because it's working now. The dozen test videos & mp3's on the flash drive all start within a second or so now.

The speed is like it should be, although the drive app has disconnected a couple times when I seek too rapidly while playing a video and trying to find a specific scene.

Shame the web based video & music player aren't a bit more full featured. And that we can't replace them with something of our own preference.

That's going to have to wait...

My mother is currently in the hospital again and the pogoplug (which I was going to use for her) is on hold.

Before she went into the hospital, I did play with it a few more times after writing that message above and the only thing I can add is that when a video is on the plug, rather than being accessed via shared folders, some videos take noticably longer to start playing.

Not massive like before, but probably at least 4-5 seconds, where as when they are on a shared folder they start playing immediately. (Guess because that's been a couple days ago and I've been rather preoccupied since. That was with both the web & P: folder access.)

So my first impression is that for local network stuff, it's a lot less useful than a simple Windows shared folder. For WAN, it looks like the video player, and the mp3 player could use some major refinement. In addition to supporting more file types, option to use native browser player instead of flash based player, etc. etc.