Windows Media Connect

on 10.13.04, 03:40pm in home theater • comments (6)

Last night, when running Windows Update, I noticed a download for Windows Media Connect. I had no idea what this was, but some investigation lead me to the following press release:


Windows Media Connect supports interoperability standards such as Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) and HTTP, and is planned to conform to the guidelines under development by the Digital Home Working Group. This will make it easy and cost-effective for consumer electronics companies to build support for Windows Media Connect into their products while following industry standards for home networking products. Windows Media Connect supports popular media formats including WMA, MP3 and PCM for audio; Windows Media Video (WMV), MPEG-2, MPEG-1 and AVI for video; and JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF for images.


Basically, Windows Media Connect is a UPNP server that can be used to stream media from a Windows XP box to any UPNP compatible consumer electronics device, such as the GoVideo Networked DVD player.


This rocks. I’m going to give it a whirl tonight, and I’ll let you know how it works out.


More information about WMC can be found in the Windows Media Connect Device Design Considerations.

6 Comments

    Dustin Mihalik (October 13, 2004 @ 4:53 pm)

    There’s a video on Channel 9 about it that was posted a while back: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=23046

    I just noticed it in Windows Update this morning and I’m hoping I get a chance to play with it tonight. I don’t have my hopes up that it’s gonna work with my D2730 since almost every other UPNP server I have tried has locked it up (except for using Twonkyvision to play music). The D5 software has some built-in transcoding using ffmpeg and the player seems pretty picky about what it will play.

    But I’d like it wo work; I don’t really like the D5 software.

    -Dustin

    Sean McLeod (October 13, 2004 @ 6:05 pm)

    Do you know if Windows Media Center, Windows Media Player and Windows Media Connect are all installed on the same PC whether they share the same media database or do each of them maintain their own database to keep track of available media?

    Sean McLeod (October 13, 2004 @ 6:08 pm)

    Or maybe they’re all waiting for WinFS ;-)

    Steve (October 13, 2004 @ 6:54 pm)

    Not sure about Windows Media Connect (will test it tonight), but Windows Media Center uses the same library as WMP does on the box (at least it does for audio).

    Dustin Mihalik (October 14, 2004 @ 12:28 am)

    I put my experiences getting the D2730 to work here: http://dmihalik.com/PermaLink.aspx?guid=f03f9def-71a3-4d4d-b66a-2c255966df1b

    It worked for music and pictures. Not so much for video. Actually worked better than I thought. Only locked up my player when I tried to play avi’s. It does not use any of the Media Player libraries. You just choose directories you want to share with other devices.

    -Dustin

    stuart (February 20, 2007 @ 8:05 am)

    hi could you help me, ive looked everywhere for a copy of windows media connect but cant fint it anywhere.CAN YOU PLEASE HELP ME.

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