One of the cool features of Windows Home Server is the ability to stream photos, music, and video to other computers on your network. Today we take a look at how to enable streaming in WHS to Windows Media Player in Vista and Windows 7.

Turn on Media Streaming on WHS

To enable Media Streaming from Windows Home Server, open the Windows Home Server Console and click on Settings.

Now in the Setting screen select Media Sharing, then in the right column under Media Library Sharing turn on Library Sharing for the folders you want to stream.

If you have a Windows 7 machine on your network make sure media streaming is enabled. You should then see the server under Other Libraries and can start streaming your media collection.

Stream Video to Media Player 11

Now let’s say you want to stream videos to another member of your household who’s using a Vista machine in another room through Windows Media Player 11. Open WMP and click on Library then Media Sharing.

Now click the box next to Find media that others are sharing then click Ok.

Now you should see the server listed under Library…where in this example it’s geekserver.

Since we only enabled Video streaming for this example, we need to click on the category icon and select Video.

Now you can scroll through the available videos…

And start enjoying your favorite videos streamed from the server through WMP 11 on Vista.

Of course you can use this method to stream photos and music as well, you just need to enable what you want to stream from the Home Server Console. You can also stream your media to Windows Media Center and Xbox which we will be covering soon.