Turn your PC into your own personal jukebox. Tutorial 5 - Media sharing with Windows Media Player

In this short video tutorial, we'll show you how you can use the media sharing functions in Windows Media Player 11. If you have a home network, Windows Media player lets you share your media with a wide variety of devices you might have around the house, such as games consoles, set-top boxes and of course other PC's too.

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Additional Notes

Troubleshooting Media Sharing - We've noticed that Windows Vista is much more successful at identifying devices on the network than Windows XP is. XP will often find devices but report them us "unidentified". When using Windows XP for sharing media, you may need to temporarily turn off all other devices on your network (other than the two devices you wish to share media between). Once you have done that, you can enable sharing with the unidentified device and be sure that it is the correct device on your network. You only need to set sharing permissions once, after that the two devices will communicate without asking for permission again.

If you find that you can't see any media on a shared music library even when you are sure there are some files in the library, try restarting Windows Media Player, this will usually cure the problem.

Finally, we recommend against turning on the setting "allow new devices or computers automatically". Even if you want to share media with everyone on your network, there have been security vulnerabilities that have taken advantage of this setting allowing hackers to gain access to your media files across the Internet.

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