On the Engineering Windows 7 blog there is a detailed post on HomeGroups in Windows 7. Home Groups should make it much easier to share content between machines around the home, including sharing content between Windows Media Center system, I think it will be one of the best features for users with multiple systems and almost to where Softsled would have been (without live TV playback). If you interested in finding out how it works and what you can do with it then its well worth reading the post but it does leave some questions like Vista and Windows Home Server support, for me Windows Home Server support is vital as I have lots on content on there

With the introduction of libraries, we also had an opportunity to remove some of the confusion between specialized media libraries that are created by Windows Media Player (WMP) or Windows Media Center (WMC). In previous versions of Windows, WMP would scan the entire hard drive on the computer to find media files and add them into a media library, but in Windows 7 this no longer has to happen. Since you already have Windows Explorer libraries, WMP and MCE just use those. If you add new locations to the libraries in Windows Explorer, WMP and MCE now automatically just pick them up since they are using the same common library for the content. We thus eliminated the need for people to manage multiple views of their data using different user experiences. In addition, WMP will also show the media libraries shared by the HomeGroup as nodes in the WMP navigation pane, mirroring the discovery and access model of Windows Explorer. So the same set of HomeGroup users you see in Explorer by default will also be shown to you in WMP as well.

 

Media Center and Homegroup sharing.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/12/30/at-home-with-homegroup-in-windows-7.aspx

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