So I was bored and decided to reinstall my main pc with windows 7 prof.  I was running vista ultimate and windows media player 11 to share movies on unraid to my xbox360.  This has always just been a bandaid until i built a new htpc or got a nmt.  I actually used it longer then I ever thought I would, because the majority of my media is either xvid or h.264 and would play on the 360.  I just set a smb share to unraid as one of the searchable locations in media player 11 and could then play the files through the 360.

 

Well with windows 7 the media sharing was taken out of media player and made apart of the OS.  Since it's a built in feature now it no longer allows you to choose a folder and then it scans for media.  Now it requires the indexing service to index the drive for media, so you can't share anything that's not on the index and it won't index remote shares.  There is probably a way around it, but out of the box it doesn't work like it did in vista. A couple of things I'm thinking are somehow forcing the indexing service to index remote files, installing media player 11, using another streaming application.

 

For now I'm to tired to play with it anymore, I'll probably try tomorrow.  Although I see the popcorn hour c-200 just came out, maybe I'll just go for one of those.

well that was easy enough to fix.  It seems media center still allows you to configure the shareable media from inside it, so you can go in and add the remote directories and it forces them into the shared media.  So now the media shows up in the shared list on the pc with an error that it might now work, however on the 360 going through the shared video library it works the same as it did before.