One of the things we all strive for is for our hobby to be accepted in the home.  Not just as a hobby we tinker with in the corner, but something our entire family can use, appreciate and come to rely on.  The Wife Acceptence Factor.  Balancing this delicate, completely arbitrary measurement against completely utilizing the technology we have at our fingertips is not always easy, and can be frustrating.  Over the course of the past 3+ years, enough tinkering has been done under my roof to get me to the point where I've nearly reached WAF nirvana in an environment that includes one Vista box, one MCE2k5 box, one XBox 360 extender and 2 XBox V1 extenders.  Here's how.

The remote control.  Do not skimp on this.  This device is the significant other's interface into this world, and if it's not up to snuff, the rest of the implementation will suffer accordingly.  Get your hands on a Harmony.  Period!

Utilize the 3rd party apps that are available.  The most essential one I've found is Andy's DVRMSToolbox.  This app enables the magic of Commercial Skip while watchng recorded TV.  I can not stress the importance of this.  Having Mrs. Lobster sit down to watch her programs, and the MCE box magically skips over the commercials is one of the single greatest gifts a husband can give to his better half (well...at least among those that do not come in a small, flip top box.)  Additionally, things like MyWeather, MyNetflix, and oher little add-ins go a long way.

Centralize everything.  This is the point of the solution.  Pervasive access to your stuff.  In my environment, this was not easy.  I'm going across 2 diferent platforms with 2 different flavors of extenders.  It's possible, but it's tricky.  Here's how I did it:

I shared my Vista recorded TV folder (Thanks Mike!) across my network.  I've seen all kinds of posts regarding people having problems with this.  If you follow those steps it will work.  If it does not, then try 1 of 2 things:  Move your Recorded TV folder out of your Public file system on your vista box and share that folder.  There's something screwy with the way that the Public folder shares it's child folders.   Or, ensure that the user name and password on your MCE 2k5 box are identical to those on your Vista box.  Either of those fixes will resolve any problems you're having with Mike's instructions.

OK, so I've now got my recorded TV shared with my 2k5 box.  What about Commercial Skip?  The 2k5 box is not on all the time, so it would not be processing the recorded TV while it's off.  Makes sense.  The main Vista box is always on, and it processes shows immediately, so why not leverage the work that's already been done.  I've shared the Commercials.xml folder on my Vista box.  Back at the 2k5 box, I've disabled the FileWatcher service, and changed the Commercial Skip configuration to point to the Vista Commercials.xml share, and viola!  Commercial Skip on the MCE2k5 box now uses the files generated by the main Vista box, and does not miss a beat.  So, now all my commercial skipping is centralized.

Now, onto a more interesting task.  One of the issues we had was the fact that the items recorded on the Vista box were available on the 2k5 box, but, the stuff recorded on the 2k5 box was not available on the Vista box.  So much for centralization!  Yes, I know, I could change the recorded TV path to the Vista share, but that's kind of clunky.  Enter Andy/babgvant with another amazing app.  Recording Broker.  This little beauty takes scheduled recordings and sends them to whatever box you designate.  The latest version has a great option to send all recordings to one machine.  Exactly what the centralized home needs!  Now, anytime a recording is scheduled on my MCE2k5 box, the recording request is sent via the broker to my Vista box, where it records using that machine's tuner and hardware.  Now, DVRMSToolbox will happily process it for commercials and serve it up to everything on my network.  Once again, centralization!

Extender time.  The 360 extender speaks for itself.  It's a great device for what it does.  The older XBox V1 extenders required a bit more work.  I've got them connecting to my MCE2k5 box, so theoretically, they should have access to the recorded TV back on the Vista box, completing the centralization.  This was initially not the case.  While using my V1 extender, I could see the recorded TV listed, but I received a video error any time I tried to play anythng residing back on the Vista box.  The problem was the user IDs that were being used.  The Vista box has a user called MCX1, created by the 360 Extender.  The V1 extnder created a user called MCX1 on the 2k5 box.  Obviously these passwords did not match, and it would fail anytime I tried playing somethng recorded back on the Vista box.  My 2nd XBox V1 extender registered with the 2k5 box as MCX2, a user that did not exist on the Vista box.  As I have the recorded TV share wide open to everyone, this user was allowed to play, delete and otherwise access everythng on that share.  So, I changed the password to the MCX1 user on the 2k5 box, reconnected the first Xbox V1 extender, it registered as MCX3, and everything worked perfectly.  Again, all recorded TV, music and movies living back at the one centralized location.

This completely centralized implementation has made it so that my Media Center solution is currently living up to what I promised the wife.  She's hooked and is an avid MCE fan now.  Thius is the type of centralization I was hoping to see out of windows Home Server.  However, that product has completely missed the mark in my opinion.

How are you set up across your home?  What creative solutions are you using that others would find helpful?