This is bad.  Trying to work around this, I have run across two serious problems that monitoring folders has relative to using the media connect technology.

First, the monitored folders don't get updated very frequently.  If I rip some music on the computer containing my library, it takes sometimes hours for the media center to "monitor" the folder for the change.  It's a network share, and it contains a lot of music, but still.

Second, I can't get music purchased through the Urge store to play over a network share.  The license download process hangs.  The same music, accessed through media connect in WMP, works fine.

These essentially make monitoring folders a non-option, and MCE as a music client useless to me.  Do we have confirmation that there is no way to connect to a remote media library from MCE?

Dave

Just to set the story straight:

- No, Media Center in Vista does not look for shared libraries even though they appear in WMP.

- Yes, this is something we are seriously considering for our next release.  Stay tuned.

- The best workaround today is to share your music out on a network share and have WMP grovel it.  However, like others have said, the groveling process can be slow over a network and the best method is to manually add the shared music to your library.

Hope that helps!

Noah

Spot on.  It's a shame this doesn't work as it seems such an obvious feature to have included in Media Center.

As well as backing this request Can I also please add another request.  And that is that the bright sparks who are responsible for defining the Windows Firewall and OneCare programs design them in such a way that when you select "Media Sharing" as an option it actually opens the right ports?  It's taken me a little while to get this up and running as OneCare just didn't allow the right ports to be opened on the Firewall and I had to set up manual exceptions.  Not particularly clever.

Many thanks

Hereward

Hi Noah - Great to hear what you're saying -

I didn't expect so much enthusiasm after my original posting back in october 2005.
Any idea when this potential "next release" is supposed to be made available?

Although the best "workaround" is to use standard SMB shares - this is extremly tedious if you have a medium/large-size library. This is particularly true because getting album arts (and, btw. any other information not located within the media file itself) correct on all instance of media center is hard to achieve - no sync. tool exists, no copy-library function is available (although 3rd. party tools try to address this) and risk to have "corruption" on one instance is high -

I like the idea of a single home-based media server (which btw. at home in my case also provide a familly web Internet web/ftp server) and in the future I expect the Microsoft WHS connected to a few extenders and/or Vista-MC, Vista-WMP11+ would really be a key to the modern way of managing familly medias -

regards,

Hello, it seems like I am not the only one trying to solve media sharing between WMP on XP machine and Media Center on Vista. The interesting thing is that in Media Center Settings --> Library Setup you can add shared folder from another computer, so technically this feature is present in the Media Center. As soon as you choose the feature, with out any delay, you recieve error saying that there are no shares found on the netwerk!?