I have had my Buffalo Cloudstor for about a week now, and have somewhat mixed feelings about it.

Well, to be more precise, I believe that the Buffalo hardware itself it solid, but I have some specific gripes about the Pogoplug software.

I had been thinking about getting a NAS for awhile, because I have a very large movie library, and having multiple external HDDs was starting to be a pain in the ass. But I had been holding off for awhile until I found something that really stood out as perfect for me. Well, I recently purchased a Xoom tablet, and when I read what popoplug software could do, it seemed perfect for use with my various devices. That is, I would like to be able to access my video library from all of my devices, those being my Xoom, my Evo smartphone, my Xbox 360, and of course my PCs. So the fact that the Buffalo Cloudstor functions as a normal NAS, and also provides the media streaming capabilities and offers mobile access to my files from anywhere via a 'personal cloud', it sounded too good to be true.

First, the hardware: I got the Cloudstor Pro, with stock 2TB HDD and an improved CPU over the standard models. As a NAS, this things seems to perform quite well. Network speed is good. It is slightly louder than I had hoped, roughly on par with my Xbox 360, but nothing compared to the sound of my PC being on.

Now, the software: Well, when I said it sounded too good to be true, it kinda is. The problems that I have with the Pogoplug software lie entirely in the whole system of automatically transcoding the videos. As I said, one of the key advantages I saw with this solution over a regular NAS was the ability to stream my videos anywhere. Keep in mind that most of my videos are AVI format. In my past experience with watching video on Android (via my Evo), I knew that Android natively only supports a limited number of formats. However, I found the excellent app called Rockplayer, which lets me watch almost any video format on my mobile devices. AVI videos stored locally play great on my Evo & Xoom using Rockplayer. So I figured that Rockplayer coupled with the Pogoplug would let me stream my AVIs in their native format to my device, and Rockplayer could handle playing them. Turns out that this is NOT the case!!! I'm not sure if this is because Pogoplug itself is only capable of streaming certain file formats, or if perhaps there is certain meta-data needed by Rockplayer in order to decode AVIs that it wasn't getting properly when streaming as opposed to playing locally.

So it turns out that in order to stream video to my mobile devices, I MUST transcode them after all. And let me just say that, when I let Pogoplug transcode videos for me, they do play great, as advertised (although the quality is noticeably reduced from the original - not terribly, but noticeably.) However, I have a serious problem with how Pogoplug handles this. First off, it is near impossible to figure out where the transcoded files are stored. So if you want to get the transcoded version off of your NAS, good luck. The original file, the fully transcoded version, and the transcoded 10-second preview are inseparably linked behind the scenes through a quasi-database in the pogoplug software.

Second, the aforementioned 10 second previews are infuriating! I'll preface this by saying that when I first hooked up my Cloudstor, I installed the necessary software to mount it as a desktop drive, set up my Pogoplug account, and then promptly began transferring over files onto the device. Boy, I wish I hadn't done that! Every single one of the videos on my drive now has a 10-second preview created for it. Apparently I needed to set the pogoplug to NEVER transcode any video before I ever put anything on it. But when I installed it, I was thinking that transcoding would be a good thing, and I certainly didn't think I needed to disable it entirely. But the 10-second previews are absolute garbage - I wish that wasn't the default behavior! On my Xbox, those previews are all it will ever play, rather than even trying to play the original. The only exception to this is for the few videos that I actually let Pogoplug transcode for me. Those play fine. But, as I said, the quality of the Pogoplug's transcoding is less-than-stellar, and it definitely looks funky on my big screen. Oh, and speaking of which, there's no way to see which videos on the device have already been transcoded and which only have 10-second previews.

So, my thinking is that I will have to remove everything off of my NAS, delete the .cedata folder and .ceid file (easier said than done), disable the transcoding completely, and then move everything back onto the Cloudstor again. Thankfully I had only put about 30 GB of video on it already, which is kind of a lot, but only a tiny fraction of my total library. And naturally I'm now going to have to do all of my transcoding manually on my computer before I put them on my NAS, as that's the only way I can keep the original version separate from the transcoded version, and have both versions equally accessible.

Now that I've gotten my long-winded rant finished, I have to admit some things. The device DOES work as advertised, for the most part. If you use the pogoplug to do all transcoding itself, the videos stream nicely to all devices I have tested them with. But this requires too many compromises to be acceptable to me, such as the reduction in quality over manually transcoded videos, and the absolute waste of space required to have two copies of every video file on the drive, including those that were in the appropriate format to begin with.

I am going to keep my Cloudstor though, because at the very least it is a solid NAS that lets me access my files from the cloud. The video streaming, however, is a frustrating experience. But I believe that with some work and careful usage, I will be able to use it decently to this end.

P.S. If anyone has any advice or solutions to the problems I have mentioned above, I would LOVE to hear them! It seems that this forum is the only place online for any real pogoplug technical help or tips.