Stream music, photo and video files around the PCs in your house

Media sharing is built into Windows Media Player (WMP) 11, which is included with Windows Vista, and WMP 12, which comes with Windows 7. In fact, Window 7 also includes a network feature called Homegroup that is designed to make sharing even easier. Unfortunately, Homegroup only works between other Windows 7 PCs, so it won’t work for sharing between newer and older PCs. For more on the Homegroup feature, see the Back to Basics feature published in Computeractive issue 344. Those with Windows XP can upgrade their version of Windows Media Player to WMP 11. However, while WMP 11 for XP will allow you to share media from your XP computer to another PC or device, you may find you are unable to browse or play back media stored on other computers. With that in mind, we recommend XP users try a different media program, such as XBMC, which is free.

For this workshop we will assume you are using either WMP 11 or 12. To launch WMP, click Start, then All Programs followed by Windows Media Player. It will automatically scan the computer for music, movie and photo files and add them to your library. To add specific folders to the library in WMP 11 click the down-pointing arrow under the Library button and select Add to Library. Click Advanced Options then Add. In WMP 12, click Organize, then select Manage Libraries, choose the type of media and click Add. More music can be added by inserting a music CD and using the Rip (WMP 11) or Rip CD (WMP 12) button. We recommend ripping to MP3 format at 192Kbits/sec, as this is a good balance between quality, compatibility and reliability when streaming. Press Alt on the keyboard, then select Tools, Options and click the Rip Music tab to adjust these settings.

With the media library set up, make sure all relevant computers and devices are switched on. In WMP 11, click the down-pointing arrow below the Library button and select Media Sharing. Click to place a tick in the box next to both ‘Share my media’ and ‘Find media that others are sharing’, then click OK. A new dialogue box will appear. Make sure there’s a tick next to ‘Share my media to’ and then highlight one of the icons in the box underneath – these should be named after other computers or devices on your network (some may be labelled ‘unknown’). Click the Allow button and repeat this for any other computers or devices you want to share with – this includes any games consoles or network music players (see Step 6). Click OK when done.

On Windows 7 PCs, click the Stream button in WMP 12 then, if available, select ‘Turn on media streaming’. If unavailable, media streaming is already switched on. Now click Stream again and select ‘Automatically allow devices to play my media’ to give access to your library from all computers and streaming devices on the network. To block or allow devices, select the More Streaming Options entry from the Stream menu. Now check the Library pane in WMP on each of the PCs on the network – WMP libraries from the other computers should be listed towards the bottom. They will be named after your other networked computers and clicking on them will allow you to browse and listen to or watch the media that’s stored on them. Check your firewall settings if you don’t see anything here.

To listen to your music through a hi-fi rather than computer or laptop speakers, consider connecting a computer directly to your stereo or using a network media device of some sort (see Step 6). Making a direct connection is easy if you have a laptop (or a desktop PC in the same room as the hi-fi), as all that’s needed is a cable to connect the computer’s headphone or audio-out socket to the auxiliary (aux-in) socket on your hi-fi. Check what type of inputs your hi-fi has, as this will determine the type of cable to buy. In most cases a 3.5mm minijack-to-minijack will do the trick, though for some devices you may need a minijack-to-phono (red and white) cable.

Network media players come in all shapes and sizes. Logitech’s Squeezebox Radio (around £160), for example, looks and works like a portable radio but also has a Wifi connection that can stream music from a shared WMP library on your PC. Games consoles, such as the Microsoft Xbox 360, can stream media from WMP libraries directly to a TV. Some digital photo frames, such as the Kodak Pulse (around £90) have networking functions that enable photo slideshows to be streamed from a PC. Setups can vary, but in most cases this will involve first adding the device to your network via either an Ethernet cable to the router or wirelessly via Wifi. Once connected, it should be possible to ‘discover’ any shared libraries and then simply browse for and play back media as required.