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

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

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 successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

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

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

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, officially referred to as Windows Media Player Legacy to retronym, distinguish it from Windows Media Player (2022), the new Windows Media Player introduced with Windows 11) is the first media player (application soft ...

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 o ...

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

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 technol ...

files. Version 2.0 added support for UNC paths and removable devices as well as enhanced support for media formats, including ASF. 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, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

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 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 integrated into a h ...

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, campus, or building, and has its network equipment and interconnects locally managed. LANs facilitate the distribution of da ...

. 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 data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

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

streamed Streaming media refers to multimedia delivered through a network for playback using a media player. Media is transferred in a ''stream'' of packets from a server to a client and is rendered in real-time; this contrasts with file downloadin ...

to the client for playing. Pictures are streamed using

HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) 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, wher ...

, different protocols are used for

music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...

and

video Video is an Electronics, electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving picture, moving image, visual Media (communication), media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, whi ...

. 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 Xbox (console), original Xbox, it is the second console in the Xbox#Consoles, Xbox series. It was officially unveiled on MTV on May 12, 2005, with detail ...

and

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

Zune Zune was a brand of digital media products and services that was marketed by Microsoft from November 2006 until it was discontinued in June 2012. Zune consisted of a line of portable media players, a music subscription service known as Zune Music ...

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