Since i built a Windows 7 pc over xmas i decided to take another look at the windows media center. Last year when looking for media server we had installed and tested windows media center xp edition and found it sorely lacking. We ended up going with TVersity and Connect 360 as servers and an xbox 360 as the client.
Windows 7 ultimate has a UpNp media server included and it shows up on the list of servers on the xbox so we decided to give it a whirl. The shop stopper for the xp media server had been it's poor codec support. What's the sense of having a media server that won't play your media?
From windows 7 you can run the media server software and it asks for the 9 digit code that is displayed on the media client. Not sure why it does this, it requires a trip upstairs to run the xbox to get the number.
This is the first problem, while the xbox lists a windows 7 media server we cannot seem to connect to it. Even running the Test diagnostic fails to find a win 7 machine. The wizard suggests some options, one if which is the windows firewall settings.
This requires a trip downstairs to check out the firewall, which by default is not allowing media center connections. Why? We have to change the firewall settings to allow media extenders which is the microsoft name for media center clients.
Back up stairs and we still cannot get a connection. We run the network diagnostics, which is a pretty screen.
The wizard suggests creating a new connection. We do this an viola! - it has now found the Windows 7 media center and it gives us a 9 digit number. So now we go back downstairs and put in the number and the extender drivers are downloaded and the media center indexes whatever content is in the shared public folders. So now it is back upstairs again to check it out.
The GUI is ok but nothing special, no competition for XBMC here. Photos and music play fine and FLAC files now work. Adding media libraries is similar to other media servers but the GUI navigation is a bit annoying. As to movies, it played the AVI and MP4 but not the MKV, which is a show stopper. You need that codec support to play extracted blue-ray movies in high def.
What we need to do is to figure out how to turn off the media server service on Win 7 and replace it with TVersity media server which we purchased and that is currently running on windows xp.
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