James Bannan23 October 2006, 11:08 AM
UPnP media streaming is becoming a household phenomenon. Windows Vista comes to the UPnP Party, but brought it own drinks...and you'd better like them.
Media sharing or media streaming is a great way to get your music collection spread around the house without copying files all over the place. It’s becoming a much more accepted way of handling digital content, with hardware UPnP clients and wireless home routers with streaming capabilities in-built.
If you have a Vista box, you can turn it into a streaming media server quite easily. Vista natively supports UPnP peer-to-peer networking, so it simply leverages of this ability plus Media Player 11’s cataloguing features to pump out music, pictures and videos across the local network.
Not all clients can connect to a Vista-based machine though. Other Vista clients can, as can the Xbox 360. Check out the PlaysForSure website for a full list of compatible clients.
Media sharing works for music files (WMA, MP3 and WAV), video files (WMV, AVI, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2), pictures (JPEG, JPG and PNG) and playlists (WPL and M3U). According to the media sharing documentation, other file types MAY be sharable, “depending on how your computer is configured” – this basically means that if the content is accessible and Media Player can catalogue it, it should be sharable.
Obviously, though, Microsoft isn't going to support anything beyond what it has explicitly stated. For content like DivX and XviD, streaming support is really dependent on the client. If the client is a Vista-based machine with the rights codecs installed, then it should work fine. Clients like the Xbox 360 don’t support DivX though and can’t be made to, and other compatible hardware-based clients will have the same limitation. (You can work around this using one of the various methods of transcoding DivX video into Windows Media Video upon playback, though. Check out Transcode 360 and Easy DivX to Xbox360 streaming.)
Setting up media sharing is extremely easy. Go into the Network and Sharing Center (right-click on the networking icon in the system tray), expand the Media Sharing section under Sharing and Discovery, and click Change. Tick “Share my media” and then OK.
The Media Sharing page gives you a choice of available devices to share media to. The default option is “Other users of this PC”, which may or may not be relevant. Once media sharing is enabled and other device come online, the computer will detect them and prompt you to configure sharing.
Click on the Settings button and you can configure exactly how you want media sharing to work.
By default, other devices will see the content shared out under your username – you can also specify what types of files are to be shared (but not file types), and you can filter out content based on its star rating and/or parental rating. These settings can also be applied per device – once a device has been authorised to share media, highlight it and click Customize, and the same options available, which will overwrite the default settings for that device.
Once media sharing is up and running, the computer now appears twice on the network – once as the actual Windows-based host, and also as a Windows networked media device. This is what other computers and devices will see on the network.
From an authorised Vista-based client, simply right-click and select “Open Media Player”. Media Player on the local machine launches, with content visible from the network device. And it’s that easy.
The one downside with media sharing on Vista is that it’s completely reliant on MP11, which means you have to catalogue your digital content in Media Player’s library first. This affects how the content is viewed on the network – the library is populated and organised using metadata, so if you’re like me and have organised your music into logical folder and filenames with little attention paid to metadata, the library could end up looking like the alley behind a dodgy pub. And that’s how it will appear to every client on the network, which is no good at all. To make navigating through the collection anything less than a hair-pulling litany of frustration, you’ll have to put some work into applying decent metadata and making the library look at least half-organised.
But all-in-all, media sharing on Vista is simple and fairly bullet-proof. And a nice touch is how comprehensive the documentation is. It follows suit with a lot of Vista’s documentation, which explains not only how to do something, but what the implications are. The media sharing documentation explains all about network security, streaming through a firewall and all sorts of other funky stuff. Kudos to Microsoft for putting the effort into making their products understandable and accessible – they’ve come a LONG way from XP’s Help and Support application.