Vista - Windows Media Extender

Windows Media Extenders are mentioned on Vista as being a way of seeing
whats on your computer by sending it to your TV or other devices. I have
reseached it some on Microsoft's website and it sounds interesting. I would
like to get feedback and recommendations from anyone who has actually
installed and used a media extender. What to purchase, how well it works and
where to get it? Thanks for any useful information you might furnish.

only the Xbox 360 is currently available. Other third party
extenders were supposed to be available for the holiday season, but
so far, they are not. You probably need to wait until 2008 for
feedback on how these work.

On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:55:46 -0500, "Bestlife" <dbest51@xxxxxx>
wrote:
--

Barb Bowman
MS Windows-MVP
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/e...ts/bowman.mspx
http://blogs.digitalmediaphile.com/barb/

I have Vista running on an HP Pavillion and an XBox 360 Media Extender on my
home network. I use the Extender for viewing recorded TV shows, home videos,
pictures and for listening to music (mp3's). All the above are files located
on my HP PC. There are a few bugs in running this configuration on Vista
which were not there when I ran the Media Center 2005 software on Windows XP.
For example, Vista has a bug that it will not stream mpeg video files to the
XBox unless you apply a hotfix patch available on the MS site, but after I
did that, the XBox started freezing intermittently when viewing mpeg files or
listening to playlists from the HP PC.

One definite recommendation is to make sure your XBox and Media Center PC
are hardwired to your network (Ethernet) and connected wirelessly. When
connected wirelessly I often got "Network Congestion"errors and choppy video
on the XBox. The XBox and wireless oruter are about 15 feet apart with no
walls between them (pretty much optinal configuration) but the video
streaming bandwidth requirements exceeded the 802.11 g capabilities. Although
I have an 802.11n router, the XBox wireless adapter does not support that
standard so I was not able to ttake advantage of the extra throughput the
802.11n standard provides.

In summary I like the XBox 360 extender function and use it all the time
when entertaining friends. It appears to be more stable on Windows XP than
Vista but I am hopeful that will be a short term situation. Hope that helps.
--
Always pushing the technology envelope


"Bestlife" wrote:

D-Link has a Draft 2.0 N DAP-1555 "media bridge" (access point
client). It handles high def TV streaming from the 3rd floor to my
first floor 360 beautifully.

On Sun, 30 Dec 2007 15:55:00 -0800, lanman
<lanman@xxxxxx> wrote:
--

Barb Bowman
MS Windows-MVP
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/e...ts/bowman.mspx
http://blogs.digitalmediaphile.com/barb/