Access to multimedia content within your local network with Windows 7

With Windows 7 and Windows Media Player 12 it becomes possible to share multimedia content from one machine to another within a local network. Guide to the preparation of the settings and use of this feature.

Together with Windows 7 came the new version of Windows Media Player, the famous Microsoft Multimedia Player weblog, that with this release reaches the twelfth version.

One of the (few) new features of the software is characterized by the ability to share media streams with other machines on the local network are also equipped with Windows 7.

Simply put, it is possible, by properly configuring systems, drawing on music, videos and pictures from a computer on the network without any effort on the part of clients.

First, you must enable the feature in Windows Media Player. This is an operation to be done on all computers, not only on the server.

Then open the media player, expand the menu Share and select Enable stream multimedia files .

We will sent to a page on the control panel that warns us, in fact, that the media streams are active. Click on the Enable button dedicated streaming media to enable them.

We enabled this feature properly. Let us focus on the client system that will act as a server. In the screen that follows, we can set up streaming media files.

You can see which computers are connected to our network have enabled local and streaming media, and through the menu on the right, allowing access to content stremmata from our system or not.

Do not miss the opportunity to further customize the settings. Clicking on Customize at the side of each computer will be possible to restrict the flows shared with them (for classification or type).

We apply the changes, go back to the client and open Windows Media Player. If we've done the procedure correctly, the left column of the player should find the entry Other multimedia catalogs and below it the server you just configured, characterized by the name of the computer.

By clicking on the entry for the server or sub-categories, we will have access to shared content from the server, corresponding to music libraries, photographic and cinematographic equipment. From here, it will be like on your home computer, double-click a file it will launch the playback.

This is a particularly useful feature of Windows 7, which allows a hypothetical netbooks to enjoy tens of gigabytes of music files without having to save to your hard drive, and laptop in the living room to play a movie from our collection without having to copy on your hard drive.

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