Let me say that I’ve been searching around to find a way to do what I am about to detail below for a few months now. Maybe I’m stupid or blind, but I could not find this anywhere, and what I could find had nearly convinced me that the following is impossible to do.
1. Set up your Xbox 360 to access Windows Media Center on a PC (Not your server, a different PC with MCE 2005, Vista HP, or Vista Ultimate – Instructions are found here). You will need to keep this computer on while setting up your Xbox with your server, and also at any time that you run media center on your Xbox (I have confirmed this by turning off my PC and then losing my connection to the server from within MC on my Xbox).
2. Open your Windows Home Server Console
3. Choose the “User Accounts” Tab
4. Select the Guest account and go through the steps to enable it, choosing “No Guest Password”, and then set your desired shared folders to “Read” (ie the videos, music, and photos shares)
5. Open Media Center on your Xbox 360 and go to Tasks -> Settings -> Library Setup
6. Choose “Add folder to watch”
7. Choose “Add shared folders from another computer”
8. Now, select the shared folders you wish to watch and finish out
9. Your Xbox should now start adding your media; I don’t know if it makes much difference, but I walked away and let mine add all my media rather than letting it do this in the background (took almost an hour though…)
Troubleshooting:
- When I did the above, my shared folders where already selected (check marks by them); which I won’t go into how I think that is just strange. And, I was having problems with not all my media having been available. I suspect that this may have been cataloging in the background, I don’t really know. However, I went back through Media Library setup, stopped watching all folders, exited out, and then went back in and re-assigned my desired folders to be watched. I then allowed the catalog to update fully.
- The computer (not your server) that you set up with your Xbox 360 needs to be “on” when using your Xbox.
- I don’t know if these FAQ’s might apply to anyone having problems with these steps:
- http://www.xbox.com/en-US/pcsetup/MCEVista.htm
- http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/mediacenter/extenderfaq.mspx
Credit:
Although, I have been utterly unsuccessful to find any posts whatsoever documenting the above “work around”, I want to give credit to the source that gave me the idea to make this work. I found this at the bottom of the page at My Movies Wiki in regards to installation instructions for the WHS version.
