Media Center Servers and Extenders
An interesting suggestion was raised in the Media Center Show forums yesterday
The user was asking about whether it’s possible for multiple Media Center PC’s to work together to share resources for extender clients.
Quote from the post
For example: Say you have two dual tuner servers and 3 extenders. Can an extender control either server or can it only be associated with one server? I’d like to be able to go to either extender and watch live tv (different channels) from whichever server has a tuner not being used.. Is something like this possible where the servers share resources so an extender can receive live tv from either?
And wouldn’t it be good if you asked your Media Center PC to record something and if there was a recording conflict the PC could ask another Media Center PC on the network to record it. It’s getting more common for people to have multiple Media Center PC’s in the home and having multiple Extenders not tied to a specific Media Center PC would be very powerful. What do you think?
Media Center Show forums are at iandixon.co.uk/forums
December 17th, 2005 at 3:55 am
It would be just great if this option was possible, but it would require a hole new structure for the mce-system(s), because right now it uses the terminal server to connect. If you wanted to connect mce “servers” it would require a cluster feactures like Windows 2003 has.
I have personally requested a MCE-sever, either an addon to Windows 2003 or a hole new OS version, you could install on your server, and then use powerfull extenders lile Xbox 360, as an front-end device. This would remove all the noise from your living room and would bring centralised management to the MCE-world.
If this solution gets released, it would be easy to add some cluster feactures to the server edition of mce, but since its a home-end product, I don’t think we ever will see a server version of mce :(
December 31st, 2005 at 10:56 pm
I have a similar quandry, but not so complicated…
I have 2 PC’s running MCE, but only have 1 tuner card. Can i watch ‘Live TV’ on both PC’s running MCE?
I have my Xbox 360 on my network and can view ‘Live TV’ on this (using Media Connect), but cannot see any way of doing this on the two PC’s…
Darren
January 3rd, 2006 at 12:53 pm
Darren at the moment you can’t do live tv on the other Media Center PC
Maybe it will be here in Vista