If you’re like most people, you probably have a computer and a home network at home. You can use your computer to access the Internet, watch TV shows and movies, listen to music, and do other online activities. But what if you want to share digital media with other computers on your home network? There are a few ways to do this. You can use a file sharing program like Windows Media Player or iTunes to share files between your computers. You can also use the Windows 7 Media Center software to play digital media on all of your computers in one place. ichever way you choose, be sure that all of your computers are connected to the same network so that you can access all of the files that you need.
Enable Streaming
To start streaming media from your Windows 7 machine you’ll need to turn it on by opening Media Player and under the Library section click on Stream then click Turn on media streaming.
Now just click the button to turn on media streaming. Alternately you can bypass WMP and open Control Panel \ All Control Panel Items \ Network and Sharing Center \ Media streaming options then click on the button to turn on media streaming and press OK.
Now you’ll see what devices are connected to the network and can select which computer or media device have access to the media.
You can also customize the streaming settings by selecting what will be shared and also notice the parental ratings control.
Setup Windows Media Player
Now that we have streaming media enabled it is time to take a look at what to look for in WMP. On another computer on the network open Windows Media Player and under Library you will see “Other Libraries” and the available libraries of Music, Video, and Pictures available for streaming.
This is a very cool new feature that can allow you to have one computer with a lot of disk capacity to run as your media server. Then have computers containing less space connect and enjoy all the media they want even netbooks…Neat!
