Note: This how-to is intended for people who know what FireFly Media Server is. If you don’t but want to read more about it, please see this tutorial on installing it on Windows Home Server. After that come back here to learn how to obtain the latest version of FireFly.
If you are an owner of an HP MediaSmart EX4xx Home Server then you’re lucky: These machines come with FireFly preinstalled and HP has already made updates available to keep your servers up to date. However, if you bought a Windows Home Server from a different manufacturer (or you are the manufacturer yourself) you may already have installed the ‘latest’ freely available version of FireFly Media Server or are maybe planning to do so.
While browsing the download section over at fireflymediaserver.org I was a little shocked to see that the latest stable version svn-1586 and the latest unstable nightly build svn-1696 both date back to 2007.
I’ve been running svn-1696 for quite some time now. A couple of days ago I recognized that whenever the FireFly service was scanning my server for new .mp3s it crashed after about 1 or 2 minutes. It was then when I went on my mission to find a somewhat more recent version of FireFly Media Server.
I knew that HP are offering a software update (version 2.5) for their MediaSmart servers, so I downloaded it from here (if this link does not work for you check this MediaSmart wiki page for the latest download URL). After downloading the file do my desktop I right-clicked it and selected ‘Create shortcut’. Now I right-clicked the newly created shortcut and selected ‘Properties’. The next step was to enter /a at the end of the ‘Target’ field:
After clicking OK I double clicked the shortcut. This launched the InstallShield Wizard which – instead of installing the software – asked me where to unpack the software package (screenshot is in german):
So I entered c:\unpacked and clicked ‘Installieren’ (= Install). Note: This will NOT install the software but really only will unpack the software package.
After the InstallShield wizard was done I opened Windows Explorer and navigated to C:\unpacked\folders\HPMSS-2.5\[PROGRAM_FILES]\Hewlett-Packard\HP MediaSmart Server\infrastructure where I found the Firefly Meda Server.exe I was looking for. Checking out the file’s properties I discovered that it was built around September, 19 2008:
I followed this tutorial on how to install it and am now running FireFly svn-1737. Thank you HP 
UPDATE: There’s a new, more detailed tutorial available here.
