Samsung YP-S5 Multimedia Player Review

Samsung Media Studio


The file transfer program which ships with the YP-S5 is Samsung’s Media Studio. This software allows you to rip music or video to your hard drive from a CD or DVD and then quickly transfer it to your player by providing you with an easy-to-understand menu and a great interface. Where some programs which come with players hinder more than help (the archaic Sony programs come to mind), throughout the month we used this player the Media Studio software provided a solid backbone for all our file transfer needs. There weren’t any longterm issues with it and indeed it was one of the more stable examples of a file transfer program we have come across in quite some time.

There was however one oddity that came up when we first installed Media Studio onto our Vista Ultimate x64 test system. We know from experience that if a program is going to show its faults, it will do so under a Vista 64-bit operating environment and Samsung’s program did not disappoint. When we first installed the latest version of Media Studio (downloaded from Samsung’s website) it kept crashing whenever we opened it up and tried to move it around on the desktop. The problem was eventually traced back to the fact that we were running Microsoft’s über-cool DreamScene desktop program with the DeskScapes add-on in order to animate our desktop image. While we were told that Media Studio should be compatible with DreamScene, it seems that the .Dream files did not play nice with the Samsung software. Since this could have very much been an issue with the myriad of ways DeskScapes can be set up, this seems to be more of a user-specific issue than a problem with the Media Studio software.

So, other than that small wrinkle, working with the included Samsung Media Studio went very smoothly and indeed, it surpassed all of our expectations in terms of user friendliness.