Heard the phrase "if it isn't broken don't fix it"?

I heard these words from my family quite a lot over the weekend. :-)

After acquiring new hardware for my main Media Center and hence rebuilding the system from scratch I found I could not share videos with the XBOX360 dashboard. As an extender it works great for WMV and DVR-MS files but I need the dashboard access to videos for DIVX files that I also host on the main Media Center. But this failed to work this time around.

Haven't experienced any problems like this previously with the XBOX and prior builds of VMC. But this time was painful. Many hours lost.

Having rebuilt the system and everything working well with Media Center itself I then had the kids asking for access to the video library through the XBXO360. However my video shares would not show even though I had shared them the same way previously.

The XBOX360 is able to share music, videos and pictures from a PC using Windows Media Player 11 (WMP11) with Media Sharing enabled. Plenty of information on the XBOX site to set this up. My new Media Center with WMP11 looked liked the videos were showing up fine and I could play the videos I wanted to share from Media Player itself. The main symptom for me was during the addition of files. WMP11 enables this through "Add to Library" and the selected folders show up in "Monitored Folders". 

Whenever I added more folders it seemed to scan but not find any files even though the same files that were not found would actually be visible in the library...but not visible from a trusted sharing partner like the XBOX or another PC...go figure. This symptom led me to the Microsoft KB 925718.

Once I completed the simple process outlined in this KB scanning new folders with the Add to Library functionality and access from the XBOX worked as expected; I hope this saves someone else time in the event you run into this same problem.

Let's hope the kids and wife will leave me alone now media is moving smoothly around the house once again...

John Hodgson