One of the features I was really looking forward to trying out was the internet streaming function going into the Release Candidate build of Windows 7. This feature wasn’t in the beta and after hearing about it I knew it was something I could put to use. While working from home has it’s advantages, getting outside your own network isn’t one of them but this past weekend we headed to the in-law’s and I had a chance to play around with this new feature.
Setup of internet streaming is a pretty easy proposition. Simply open Windows Media Player, go to the sharing menu at the top of the screen and allow your main PCs content to be accessed via the internet.
You’ll be required to associate a live account with WMP and if you don’t already have it, install a plugin. This will have to be done on on your media PC as well as the machine you wish to use to access your content. One thing to keep in mind: this will only work between Windows 7 RC machines. Internet streaming won’t work with the beta or older versions of Windows.
Once you’re all set up things get pretty easy. When you start WMP on your remote machine, you should see your media PC listed under “Other Libraries”. If you’re on your home network, it will show the standard icon however I noticed that if you look fast enough after setting up internet sharing, the icon will have a globe on it. I have to assume this indicates that it is a shared internet library.
When it comes to using the feature, I was very pleased. I was spending the day in Montreal and only had my Aspire One netbook with me. Even with this low powered machine, and on a wireless network, navigation was very quick. I streamed several items including some music and video. Music was not a problem at all. I took a crack at several tracks and once started, I never heard any skipping what so ever. Video was a similar experience. It of course took longer to start but once it was running it worked as well as could be expected. You’re not going to get HD resolutions but when you consider what you’re doing, it shouldn’t be expected. The video was actually very similar to what I experienced using Orb in the past. For about the first 15 seconds it looked very blocky and there was some breaking up of the picture. After that however, once there was a chance for the content to buffer, the picture quality came up and I was able to enjoy my own video content as well as recorded TV in what I would say was SD quality very close to what you would get streaming from video websites.
Overall, Microsoft has done a great job including this feature with Windows 7. For me, it actually worked better than I expected. I figured that video would be laggy and not really that enjoyable but being able to access my content and watch it at a relatively good resolution was a great surprise. If you travel frequently or just want to be able to watch content from work, etc., then this new Windows 7 feature is something you should enjoy!
I really wish this feature worked from Vista. I would really like to be able to stream content from my Windows 7 Media Center to my Vista laptops. The main laptop I use at home is actually a work machine, so I can't upgrade it to Windows 7.
I really wish this feature worked from Vista. I would really like to be able to stream content from my Windows 7 Media Center to my Vista laptops. The main laptop I use at home is actually a work machine, so I can't upgrade it to Windows 7.