Sharing and streaming with Windows Media Player

By chance I discovered something today that I've been looking for almost since I started Windows Media Player - a way to access all my media from a central machine without relying on copying or Windows network sharing. The former is a pain and a waste of disk, yes even if I have hundreds of gigs of it, and the latter is very prone to drop outs during even the slightest network glitch.

What I found is a Windows Media Player (WMP from now on) plugin called On2Share. This little gizmo scans all the files your WMP knows about and then makes them available using the Windows Media Connect protocol. This wouldn't be so useful on its own - you can download the WMC software from Microsoft and it will do the same for you - with a fancier interface and better features too boot. But it turns out Microsoft has never provided a software client for their protocol so the only thing it could be used with was hardware clients, like the Roku music player.

So the really nifty thing about On2Share is it also includes a WMC protocol client which sees other On2Share servers on your LAN (it uses UPnP so some fiddling with your firewall and Windows services may be required) and any PCs with Windows Media Connect installed and turned on. What happens then is all the files on your remote machien running On2Share show up under a new playlist. You basically see exactly what the remote machine would see in its library - All Music, music by artist, album, and even custom playlists. You can then play from those playlists and On2Share, or more accurately Windows Media Connect, gets on and streams the files for you.

The nice thing is that while streaming Windows downloads the content as quickly as possible. So within your LAN you'll get the entire track very soon and you don't get affected by brief network glitches that occur with say, a WiFi network. Well that's my experience anyway, compared to pointing a remote WMP at a shared drive.

The disadvantages I've experienced are:

• On2Share server takes a long time to index all the files WMP knows about
• Once its indexed them it doesn't keep that list cached so every time it starts it has to re-index
• On2Share doesn't run as a service - it runs as a user so every time you log in its starting from scratch with the indexing
• The client also takes a very long time to get the list of tracks from the server (my collection has 4000 tracks and isn't huge)
• When the client sees a WMC enabled computer it doesn't see the playlists and tracks by artist or album - I don't know if this is a WMC problem or an On2Share problem
• When playing tracks there is always a brief gap between them, usually not noticeable if you tracks are separate with some silence between them anyway.
  
• Crossfading does not cure this problem - in fact it doesn't seem to work with streamed tracks, again I think this may be a generic WMP problem.
• The On2Share site is really bad and has nothing in the way of proper documentation, just a few FAQs and a forum with almost nothing in it.

Other than this I'm happy that such a product finally exists. I'm hoping they'll soon either improve it or someone else will come out with a better one. Maybe even Microsoft will start supplying such a client as part of WMP. As best I can tell there is an add-on for Windows for Tablet PCs called "Windows Media Transfer" that not only transfers media files, but also supports streaming. Very useful for a hard-disk challenged Tablet, but also very useful for laptops in the home, and I would say anyone with a Pocket PC.