Andrew Grant took a stab at running Windows Media Center on a Windows Home Server machine. Before you start jumping up and down for joy, this is just an experiment and as you know, experiments don't always turn out as expected. Hopefully this will make it on Microsoft's radar and within a few years WHS, as we know it today, will morph into a complete Windows Home Entertainment Server (HES).
What do you think? Would you like to see Media Center features on a Home Server platform? Thanks to Ed Bott for turning me on to Andrew's article.
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6 comments:
Hi,
since my WHS is already running all day, it seemed natural to me to use it also as a PVR.
It took quite some fiddling, because WHS lacks the video support needed for playback, but I've managed to install a video driver and all necessary codecs and run GB-PVR to record and watch my favourite shows.
So my WHS is no longer headless, it's connected to my tv ;)
No matter what, I want HomeServer to remain headless. Along with Media Center, I'd like to see WebGuide integrated as well. My guess, is that Microsoft will integrate something like WebGuide before they get around to porting Media Center.
Honestly, I think WHS should be left the way it is. I know it's in our nature to minimize clutter and cost, and maximize the tools we already have.....but a server is a server, and it's meant to be that way. It's meant to be a file storage, back-up device. That is it's purpose and that is what it's built to do, I feel if you throw too much more at it, it compromises it's main purpose and may hinder it's life span or even cause unknown issues and cause it to crash prematurely.
So in short, no. Leave it alone, add all your hard drive space to it, and keep a small drive in a media center PC, and allow it to sync up to the media files from the server networked.
Just had this discussion with a friend of mine looking to build a AIO media center PC, and the conclusion was to have both a WHS and a MCPC. The way we did it was took his older PC, which had a good dvd-rw drive and a new 750gb drive, and built a MCPC new with motherboard, case, ram, processor and a 160gb sata drive. Then we are parting out the rest of his old PC, using that money to build a Shuttle WHS with a 1tb and the 750gb drives.
So what we have is the WHS backing up the OS on the MCPC, and houseing all the media, accessed through the net and through the internal network, and the MCPC doing nothing but surfing the net and playing media on a 1080p 46" LCD. Simple, and to not create the x-mas light effect, if one goes out, they ALL don't go out...
w3rd
I had WHS installed, but I had to uninstall it and just use XP and Norton Ghost. It tied up a whole computer and I could not hang my network printer off it and would always freeze when I tried to edit pictures.
Any chance any of this has improved? It seemed more like a beta test software.
I'm curious to know if anyone has gotten the system to work with Directv's media share feature on their new receivers? I've got the photos to work just fine, but it does not like the videos. It shows them, but it says they are not compatible formats.
I would maybe like to see it be able to stream media a little better. I have been using it as file storage and accessing movies and music using a small HP slimline pc media center and sonos and it works great but I would like to have extenders be able to play vobs. Whether that is a solution for WHS or extenders is up to the developers, but that is the way I would like it to work.
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