Windows Media Connect (WMC) is a UPnP AV server from

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

for

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

and later Windows operating systems, to share and stream media on a

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

computer to WMC clients. The first two releases of WMC were made available as stand-alone software, and included a client as well. Following that, it was renamed to Home Media Ecosystem (HME) and the media server component was integrated into

Windows Media Player Windows Media Player (WMP) is the first media player and media library application that was developed by Microsoft for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on ...

and

Windows Home Server Windows Home Server (code-named Quattro) is a home server operating system from Microsoft. It was announced on 7 January 2007 at the Consumer Electronics Show by Bill Gates, released to manufacturing on 16 July 2007 and officially released on ...

. WMC version 2.0 can be manually installed on Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 32bit or 64bit operating system but this type of installation is not officially supported by Microsoft and requires manual tweaking of NT Services' dependencies in order to run.

Version history

WMC 1.0 was originally released as an

out-of-band Out-of-band activity is activity outside a defined telecommunications frequency band, or, metaphorically, outside of any primary communication channel. Protection from falsing is among its purposes. Examples General usage * Out-of-band agreement ...

update to

, which could stream only

Windows Media Windows Media is a discontinued multimedia framework for media creation and distribution for Microsoft Windows. It consists of a software development kit (SDK) with several application programming interfaces (API) and a number of prebuilt technolo ...

files. Version 2.0 added support for

UNC UNC is a three-letter abbreviation that may refer to: Education * University of Northern California (disambiguation), which may refer to: ** University of Northern California (Santa Rosa), in Petaluma, California, United States ** University of Nor ...

paths and removable devices as well as enhanced support for media formats, including

ASF ASF may refer to: Arts and entertainment * Alabama Shakespeare Festival, a drama festival * ''Asimov's Science Fiction'', a U.S.-based English-language science fiction magazine containing SF stories Science and technology Biological * A ...

. Future versions were not released as stand-alone applications, but integrated into

, where it powers the ''Network Sharing Service'' feature. WMP 11 in

contains WMC 3.0, and in

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

it contains WMC 4.0; the

version of WMP 11 includes a WMC client as well. While WMC 3.0 and WMC 4.0 offer similar feature-set, they are built using different codebases. With WMP integration, WMC can make available the entire media library managed by WMP. When a shared library is browsed by the WMP client, it can be browsed, filtered and sorted like a regular WMP media library. On

by default, Windows Media Connect 2.0 does not work after Windows Media Player 11 has been installed, although Windows Media Player 11 only includes the UPnP AV server and does not include the client.

Overview

WMC is a UPnP AV server that can make media files stored on a computer available to UPnP AV-compatible

digital media receiver A digital media player (also sometimes known as a streaming device or streaming box) is a type of consumer electronics device designed for the storage, playback, or viewing of digital media content. They are typically designed to be integra ...

clients over a

local area network A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a larger ...

. WMC advertises itself to the clients, so there is no need to manually configure the client to connect to the WMC server. Multiple WMC instances can run at a time, all will be accessible to a client. Any UPnP AV client can be used to access WMC shared media. The client can query WMC for the list of files shared, the result of the query is formatted using

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

. Once it chooses from the list the media to be played, the media file is

streamed Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. ''Streaming'' refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content it ...

to the client for playing. Pictures are streamed using

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

, different protocols are used for

music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...

and

video Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syste ...

. A client supporting the UPnP Media Renderer standard will be able to render the stream. While any UPnP AV client can act as a client, using a dedicated WMC client, like the

Xbox 360 The Xbox 360 is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. As the successor to the original Xbox, it is the second console in the Xbox series. It competed with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation ...

and

PlayStation 3 The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment. The successor to the PlayStation 2, it is part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. It was first released on Novemb ...

Zune Zune is a discontinued line of digital media products and services marketed by Microsoft from November 2006 until its discontinuation in June 2012. Zune consisted of a line of portable media players, digital media player software for Windows Per ...

music player, WMP 11 in

or the WMC standalone client (available as part of WMC 2.0) can give an enhanced experience. The query results for the list of media contain certain metadata about the files as well, including media type, dates, rating, keywords for artist, albums etc. It also contains shared playlists. A WMC client uses these

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

to present the media items categorically for browsing. The top-level menu in a WMC client has containers for ''Audio'', ''Video'', ''Pictures'' and ''Playlists'', and sub-menus further categorize the media. Client-side playlists can be created out of these shared files as well. When the WMC 11 client is used to access a library shared by WMC 3.0 or WMC 4.0, it lists the media files as a ''Shared Library'' using the same library view it uses to organize local media files, complete with album art and thumbnails.

References

WMC Frequently Asked Questions

External links

Microsoft Resource Page

Download of Windows Media Connect (for Windows XP 32 bit only)
{{Windows Components Home servers Microsoft Windows multimedia technology

Version history

Overview

See also

References

External links