Tip on getting Media Center Extender sessions to play DVDs from Windows Home Server

Matt Pietrek has an interesting tip on his MSDN blog about getting ripped DVDs to stream from Windows Home Server to Media Center Extenders (in his case an Xbox 360), Matt kept getting "video decoder error". Where a lot of us would get frustrated with the error and start looking for a window to chuck the box out of Matt used Process Monitor to diagnose it was a permissions problem. I will let you read the Matt’s post for the details but it looks like it was a Guest Account issue on the Home Server

I’ve been going batty trying to play ripped DVDs residing on my WHS box through my XBox 360. I’d done all the due research, and had followed all the various directions around making symbolic links on my MCE box, installing transcoder.dll, etc… I got the DVD Library to show up on the 360, but whenever I tried to play the file, I received the dreaded "video decoder error".

Having some free time on a Saturday, I decided to not come for air till I had it working.

My first step was to run Process Monitor on my local (Media Center) machine, and collect file activity during a request to play the DVD. I could see in the EHShell process where it successfully opened the .MPEG file on the local machine. However, the .MPEG file is just a link to the actual .VOB file on the WHS share. EHShell was failing to open the .VOB file on the server, even though I could see/copy the exact same file from a command prompt. The error for the CreateFile call was LOGON_FAILURE……