Vista Windows Media Center And Video Content on Network Shares
I just upgraded my media center box from XP MCE 2005 to Vista Ultimate. While I still believe Vista should be detected and reported as malware, I’m willing to acknowledge areas where it’s improved, and Windows Media Center is definitely a big improvement.
However, there’s one change in Media Center since 2k5 that really pisses me off. On my network, all of my video files are stored on an Infrant ReadyNAS box. The box, kassad, has a Windows file share called media. Within media is the videos folder, and within that are folders TV and Movies (as well as folders I do not want WMC to browse). Since I want to expose only some of the folders on the share, I can’t add the whole share. In 2k5, I could map drive letters to network shares like \kassad\media\videos, add the mapped drives as “local” folders, and thereby have access to just TV and Movies without any hassle.
Now, though, WMC is much better. Now it’s smart enough to detect when a drive is a network drive, and not let you map it as a local folder. That makes alot of sense! What’s worse, I couldn’t find any MS docs describing a workaround. Surely I’m not the only one who wants to access media on some nested folder within a file share!
Turns out, I’m not. I ran across this post, which revealed the secret handshake. In the C:\Users\Public\Public Videos folder, you add shortcuts to the folders on the network share that you want to expose, restart WMC, and voila!, they show up. Not a bad solution, I suppose, except that it seems to be woefully underdocumented.
As an aside, if you’re still using a keyboard and mouse to start and stop your video content, you really need to look into WMC. You can buy a remote for $30, hang a widescreen LCD monitor on the wall, and have a nice digital media center using an old (two years, not ten!) computer. Now I know what it was like for early television viewers when the remote control was invented.