Windows Media Connect

Windows Media Connect (WMC) is a UPnP AV server from Microsoft for Windows XP and later Windows operating systems, to share and stream media on a Windows 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 and Windows Home Server. 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.

WMC 1.0 was originally released as an out-of-band update to Windows XP, which could stream only Windows Media 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 Windows Media Player, where it powers the Network Sharing Service feature. WMP 11 in Windows XP contains WMC 3.0, and in Windows Vista it contains WMC 4.0; the Windows Vista 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 Windows XP 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.

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