I just bought a HP MediaSmart WHS this past week and I am still unsure how I want to set this server to be used in my home. Right now I currently have a 2005 MCE machine that records my TV, stores all my music, my photos, and my videos, along with my ripped DVD movies, and my xVid Movies. I also have 2 other Vista laptops in the house. On my laptop I tend to store all my digital media on my MCE box. For simplicty for my wife who is not real techy like myself I just have her store all her media locally to her machine and I have shown her how she can go into Windows Media PLayer and see the network content on my MCE machine from her laptop. My question is are most people taking their digital media that was on their MCE's, Desktops, and Laptops and placing it on the WHS and just redirecting their My Doc, My Music, My Photos, My Videos, etc. to point to the WHS or are they leaving everything local and just having the WHS do backups of the systems every night? My other question is are people putting their recorded and live TV redirected to the WHS or again leaving it local? I use my Xbox 360 to stream now and I am not sure if moving the content is really gonna matter. I guess what I am thinking is if I move all my digital content to the WHS then I would also need to make sure I am backing up my WHS as well. If I leave it local to the machine then nightly backups are happening and I then have 2 copies in reality. Only problem with this is if I want to find digital media that is located on my other systems in the house then I have to look in several locations rather then knowing it would all be in one place if on the WHS.
Can't wait to hear what others are doing. If people are redirecting their Live and recorded TV can someone give me the info on how to set this up on a OEM version of WHS and not the pre-release stuff.
TheDigitalLifeStyle.com the home of The Media Center Show! Microsoft MVP
I'm actually close to completion on an application which will make your local Recorded TV be moved overnight to your Windows Home Server, your Media Center and extenders will automatically be configured to pickup the media from the Recorded TV share on WHS as well as locally. This way the user experience is identical, you see your media on your extenders and your main MCE machine without any additional effort. On the night prior it's on the MCE machine, the next morning it's on home server. When looking at your Recorded TV in media center it looks like it never moved.
I'm close to releasing a closed beta (within a week I hope), and should release shortly after that. The application is a very simple installation (aiming for one click, currently on target), and will offer a few other facilities such as carrying additional files with the move and cleaning up associated files etc. I have a couple of other cool features i'm trying to sneak in last minute, but I'm waiting to see how they turn out before announcing them.
I say a bit more about it over on my blog on on10 : http://www.on10.net/blogs/EnglishBloke/
Richard Miller MCE MVP
Of course Richard, I'm going to try and open this to our MCE MVP's soon, I've been so busy lately I haven't had a second to get the beta finished yet, it's so close to complete it's killing me everynight when I don't get to finish it :) So it's close, hopefully in the next week I'll have something to the internal list, I'd like to see MVPs with it very soon after that, aiming for a public beta maybe 2 weeks after that.
Cheers
Steve