Ok I have had some real fun with getting my XBox to see my XP desktop. It was easy enough to get it to see my Vista laptop after I set up Windows Media Centre (WMC), and although WMC sees everything on my network it has no supports for DivX, so doesn’t really meet my needs.
Diagram of XBox on wireless network, but media sharing can be on wired or wireless network.
However playing video through the XBox dashboard does have DivX support, but this way it only finds files that are local to my laptop and I wanted it to see my whole network. It wasn’t as straight forward as it should have been so here is my quick guide on how I managed to get it working. It’s not the only way, there are 3rd party tools out there.
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Sharing media
Firstly you need to share the media from your XP machine. To do this you need Windows Media Player 11 (WMP11). WMP11 adds a bit of Vistas functionality into XP, so under Library>Media Sharing… click the checkbox and allow access to the XBox 360.
Problem 1
This didn’t work straight off for me, it just hung for ages and then nothing happened, no sharing and no error.
Solution 1
Check which services are running. Start>Admin tools>Services. You need to make sure UPnP and SSDP are both started and set to Manual, also check Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service is started and set to Automatic.
Problem 2
Once I’d done this I was able to share my media and allow my XBox. However my XBox still refused to see my XP machine on the network. So my PC could see the XBox but the XBox wasn’t seeing the PC. After a bit of reading around online and trying loads of stuff it became clear DRM was the issue. WMP11 DRM doesn’t work properly, it makes sense then that the XBox which is DRM’d up to it’s eyeballs would start having issues.
Solution 2
Clear out the existing DRM data. You need to set your Folder Views to include System files. Then navigate to Documents and Settings>All Users> DRM and delete all files.
Then go this link in Internet Explorer:
http://drmlicense.one.microsoft.com/Indivsite/en/indivit.asp?force=1
If ActiveX blocked you’ll need to allow it, once that’s done the greyed out Upgrade button should become clickable. Click it and what for the process to run then close the box. Reboot PC (definately) and XBox (possibly). After this the XBox detected the PC and media sharing was enabled.
All credit goes to @DocJelly and his amazing blog post for this solution.
Problem 3
This was a fairly simple problem to solve. The XBox doesn’t see folders that are shared on the networking the same way and WMC does, it only see the folders that are part of your shared WMP11 Library.
Solution 3
In WMP11 go to Library>Add to Library…
Add any folders with media that you want to share and click OK, it can take a while for your PC to catalogue the new folders and files.
Ongoing Issues
The Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service is a memory hog, so it may be worth disabling sharing if you aren’t using it frequently.
Even with WMP11 Library I’ve found it a little unpredictable about what the XBox will and won’t see. This might be because files are still being catalogued, so I’ll give it a bit longer before I investigate further.