Holy shit! I don't want to be overly optimistic here, but I believe I have found a working solution to this problem. It is working right now, but I am fearful that it will somehow break spontaneously. Pray for me children...
What's going on? Well, I have a XBox 360 that I connect to my main machine via the WMP11 sharing services so I can watch videos. Works great and plays MP4, DIVX, etc... unlike the Windows Media Extender functionality. It is clean. I love it. So, I have a LOT of video since I have started encoding my DVD collection. Because of this, I am running out of drive space and want to keep stuff like that off my main machine anyway. So, I have a NAS device (D-Link DNS-323) running in a RAID 1 (mirroring) configuration. No problem, just map it as a drive in Vista, add it to the WMP11 "library" and bingo, watch everything from there on my Xbox 360. Wrong! I have fought with this forever, but today, I may have found the answer.
So, there are two things that I had to do to make this happen.
First, I had to change the Logon of the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service to use an account that has access to the NAS. Makes sense. But that alone did not do the trick.
Next, In the key HLKM/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/MediaPlayer/Preferences/HME, I had to add a DWORD called EnableRemoteContentSharing and set the value to 1.
I restarted the service, turned on the XBox and BAM, I saw the Video folder I had shared from my NAS. While holding my breath, I started up Kung Fu Panda (better then you would expect) and it played! Yay!!!! Hopefully this problem is now resolved. If so, I will be getting a couple of HUGE drives for that NAS asap. If not, I will scream and yell and report back to you all via this blog. Damn, I hope it works!
I search high and low for this answer, but to give credit where it is due, I found the final pieces that put it all together for me in this article.
UPDATE 1: As of this morning, it is still working, but I have noticed that WMP's library (which the XBox 360 uses to generate its list of available videos) did not update automatically. I had to refresh it from my PC. I am not sure if this was a one time thing, or will be an ongoing problem. I will keep a close eye on it.
