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This windows bug has been reported and 'answered' before by several people, but the 'answers' do not work for me - nor do they seem to work for many other people in this and other forums. I hope you can provide me with a real diagnosis, a reason for why this happens, and a real solution that works for everyone.
I am trying to 'Turn on media streaming' in Windows Media Player so I can stream to my xbox and other home theatre equipment. The problem I have is the same problem that [many] other people have reported: in Windows Media Player, I press the Turn on media streamin 'link', the button greys shortly, but then nothing, and streaming is not enabled.
I do not have a network problem. I was able to extend Microsoft Media Center to my xbox. (just not turn on streaming in WMP). Using media center extended is a great (better) workaround for the xbox, but it is not a solution for my other home theatre devices. I need to be able to stream to my receiver and blu-ray player as I was able to do on my old PC running Windows XP.
I have a new install of Windows 7 Pro, x-64 on a new self-built machine. Everything else works, its not the machine. I have installed all the latest drivers for my machine. I have all the latest updates for Windows 7. I run Windows Firewall and Kaspersky Anti Virus 2010. I have installed Microsoft Office 2007, Outlook 2007, Visio 2010, and many other 'standard' applications. I am not running any 'weird' low-level programs.
As other people 'suggested' I have already tried the action of exiting WMP, stopping the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service using service.msc, then removing the .wmdb (and other files but not directories) from my Users/xxx/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Media Player dirctory, restarting the WMP Network Sharing Service using services.msc, and then restarting WMP. This had no effect. (I tried this several times with and without restarting the WMP Network Sharing Services manually. I tried changing the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service, Log On tab from Network Service (the default on my system) to Local System with 'allow services to interact with desktop' selected as someone else 'suggested'. This didn't seem to effect anything. I also tried uninstalling WMP and WMC Player (using 'Turn Windows features on or off'), restarting, then adding them back and restarting. This time at lesat the 'Turn media sharing on' icon came back in WMP (the icon is usually gone from the WMP Stream/Turn on media sharing window). This time Windows 7 Pro thought about it a little longer before doing nothing. (However, now I get an error message 'An error has occurred. Not all of the features were successfully changed.' when attempting to 'reinstall' Windows Media Center after reinstalling WMP.) The reinstall of WMC didnot return an error. I can no longer start Windows Media Center on my PC.
So, by all the messages on this topic, its obvious this is a real bug in Windows 7 (maybe only on Pro?), (maybe only on x-64?).
Just two more things about my setup... I did not originally set up homegroup (because I have no other Windows 7 machines), but I did try setting that up to see if it had an effect (it didn't). The only 'weird' part of my install, is that I mounted my D: drive (2nd harddrive) on C:\Users (because I use a Solid State Drive for the OS on C: and dont want the Users data on it). This has not caused any other problems, but I wanted to throw it out there in case Windows Media Player sharing does something weird here. (And no, I'm not going to 'try changing' that, unless its a known fact that this is the problem - and then I would need a different solution for moving my Users data off the SSD.)
So please, let me know what the real problem is, why it happend to me (I'm sure some people can turn streaming on in WMP), and what the real solution is. (There seem to be a multitude of suggestions on the web for all kinds of different 'fixes', but which, if any, is the right one? Please do not just suggest things to try. What's the right fix?
ok if your still needing help i may be able to give you a solution.
IF your trying to share on windows 7 with your xbox/ps3
on your computer
1. go to windows media player
2. makes sure your switched to library
3. click on stream
4. now click on the bottom one which should say allow windows media sharing or something like it.
it will now prompt you to allow devices next click ok. and it should work. have any questions just e-mail me*** Email address is removed for privacy ***
Go to network and sharing center open view full map, right click on your PC and click manage.
then open services and applications, then serivces and find Upnp device host, right click and click restart,and make sure it is set to Automatic.
Now scroll down to Windows Media Player Network Sharing service, right click and click restart, and make sure this is set to Automatic also.
That should work, it worked for me and everyone i know but... The only problem i have is when i restart my PC the Windows Media Player Network Sharing service changes from automatic to automatic (delayed start) and i have to Restart the Upnp device host and the Windows Media Player Network Sharing service again.
Other than having to do this every time i restart my PC it works perfect.
Also, if anyone has any idea to why it changes to (delayed start) let me know thanks..
Hi Barb,
Thanks again.
Actually, by chance I did create a new Admin account (so I could backup all my orig files in preparation to reinstall windows 7 and see if that worked), and in the new Admin account I was successfully able to turn streaming on and stream to my xbox and rest of my home theatre. Yeah! So, it seems to me something got messed up somehow in my original admin account, (though why that would happen is still a mystery to me... I still think its a windows bug that occurs maybe when entering/exiting some window without turning streaming on first, (like setting up a homegroup or something), or maybe some driver install changed something in my registry for that user account. Obviouslly all the files I need are in as streaming worked in the new user account. (Note that this time, turning on streaming was pretty much the first thing I did in that account.)
Unfortunately, that doesn't solve the problem completely, because even in the new account, I cannot reinstall windows media player. (Still get the same error message as above.) So, the uninstall/install process (based on someone else's suggestion messed something else up. (I thought everyone liked Windows 7... seems like its not 100% ready even now.) Come on microsoft, this is unacceptable.
So I think I am stuck reinstalling windows anyway - to get wmc back (I do like the media center extender to xbox, and plan to eventually record tv.) I might first try a windows system restore if windows still has one prior to me uninstalling wmp/wmc. (Unfortunately windows deleted the system restore I made just after my clean install and installing the hardware drivers. - yikes, thought if I created one manually, windows wouldn't delete it! Thanks again microsoft for wasting more of my time.)
I am by no means a windows expert.. just an engineer stuck using it... so I'm not familiar with the debugging tools. Thanks Barb for your suggestion to run sfc /scannow, (that's what I'm really looking for... a way to figure out what's really wrong) but unfortunately I get the message "You must be an administrator running a console session in order to use the sfc utility" when I try to run it. Don't understand that, because I'm running a cmd window from my new Admin user account.
I've been having exactly the same problem, without being able to solve it by following other solutions.
I realised that I have one major thing in common with your set-up. That is: keeping OS files separate from user files.
The way I've gone about separation is via the new Symlinks feature of windows 7. I therefore have windows installed on c:\ and a SymLink at c:\Users\myUsername pointing to e:\Users\myUsername. The user files as you can see are stored on the e:\ drive. Perhaps when you say you "mounted" you D:\ here, that means the same thing. To be able to create the SymLink I had to first copy all the relevant user files/directories to the e:\ drive. I did the following:
1. Create a new account in windows, by default in c:\Users
2. Create a dummy admin account to perform all move/copy operations from
3. From the dummy account copied the c:\Users\myUsername directory to the e:\Users dir I created using windows explorer copy/paste (first I tried robocopy but this dropped some of the important user definition files)
4. Delete the old dir (with difficulty) from c:\Users
5. Create a SymLink with "mklink C:\Users\myUsername e:\Users\myUsername /J"
6. Logged out of dummy account and into myUsername (this is where it failed when I used robocopy as it said it was using a temp profile instead)
Because of my methodology any future accounts will still be on c:\Users and I would have to follow the same steps to move it across. Although this is pretty annoying, it was beneficial in this case. As you mentioned in your last post, creating a new admin account worked for you (solving the streaming problem). I realised that, for me, that solution could work. If there was something wrong with my SymLink process then the new account wouldn't experience it. As expected, in the new account I was able to go straight into windows media player and turn on the streaming with no problem, if fact never even seeing the "turn on media streaming" page that I've previously sat at clicking the button, watching it go grey and then doing nothing.
I decided to try and copy this account across to e:\ after having turned on media streaming to see if it would still work. This then brought back the infamous "turn on media streaming" button. So I've tied down what I'm doing to cause this problem, but not exactly what the root of the problem is. When I was moving the new Admin account across, I realised that the original account had a bunch of hidden files which didn't exist on the account copied to e:\ (Although I know some of the hidden files were going across as I wasn't having the problem I had with robocopy).
My conclusion is that WMP uses some hidden/system files stored in the user directory, in order to set up the media streaming. It seems odd that I've not experienced any other similar issues from missing files here, but I think something has missed off in the copy process and that's causing the problem.
I'm now going to try and find a way around the storage issue because I don't want Windows being mixed up with my user files. I think a need a way to copy a Dir and ALL the files beneath it. Shouldn't be too hard right...
did you make any further progress with this issue after your discovery?Barb Bowman
I'm afraid I've hit a bit of a snag with copying SymLinks from one directory to another. Unfortunately they're pointing at folders which are part of the same tree that I'm trying to move. Therefore they can't copy across as SymLinks to the original dir, using the /b flag in xcopy (I can't get this working even though it won't help) and they can't copy across as new directories which clone the SymLink (which I can get to work, strangely using /b /e flags in xcopy).
For example: I need to work out how to take a junction pointing at "c:\users\test account\app data\roaming\microsoft\windows\sendto" which is located at "c:\users\test account" and move it to "e:\users\test account", pointing at "e:\users\test account\app data\roaming\microsoft\windows\sendto".
Hopefully that makes sense. Oh and also the symlinks are hidden/system links in the original folder. Searching the web for "copying symlinks" has been a bit fruitless. I have been trying to find windows specific notes on this though, there's a lot out there in Linux docs.
Hi Larry,
It seems to me (i.e. best guess) that you are right that the processes you and I used to move c:\Users onto a different physical hard drive ultimately caused the weird problem with Windows Media Streaming, and it also seems to me (best guess) that you are correct that robocopy /mir /xj is not making an exact copy of the \Users directory structure (as I was led to believe it would in the forums) and that's probably somehow causing Windows 7 to mess up its context based menus/buttons causing the broken streaming feature. When I ran robocopy, I did see messages about 'files' or 'directories' - can't remember exactly, being skipped, which I ignored since one of the posters said to just make sure there were no 'Failed' files. (It's so hard to know who really know what they're talking about in these forums.) I did use diskpart and 'mounted' the new drive onto c:\Users based on someone else's suggestion as it seemed (a complete guess) more robust than a 'link' (mklink) - I had to pick one way, but for all I know, maybe they do the same exact thing. (Refer to "Assign a mount point folder path to a drive" in windows help in Disk Management - See 'Using a command line' on that help 'page'.) If I right-click in Windows Explorer on c:\Users, and select 'Properties', it is now listed as a 'Mounted Volume', not a link. The mount should be very low level, so I hope all programs can't tell the difference. I guess a link should be the same, but who knows...
After my original post, I did do a complete new install of Windows 7 Pro, x64 on reformatted drives, and immediately moved C:\Users to my D:\ drive (using robcopy and diskpart) - then installed my wireless adapter - and then checked WMP, and saw the same problem with the errant 'Turn streaming on' button. First I was convinced it was the adapter driver (Netgear WNDA3100v2 which is not Win7 64 certified), so I started from scratch again, but with a different wireless adapter, but this time went through a large part of the rest of my install (windows updates, driver installs) before I finally checked WMP, and the streaming button again didn't work! (I wish I had checked WMP immediately after the Win7 install and moving c:\Users, but I didn't - I had been convinced it was the Netgear driver.) So, I didn't 100% verify, but I guess its moving the Users directory they way I did it (robocopy) that messed me up. Maybe the its the combination of doing that and then adding any wireless adapter. (Windows makes you answer some home sharing questions when you install the adapter, so maybe that has something to do with it.)
SO I can't say I know 100% what's going on here. It is repeatable. (And I'd still call it a windows bug.) But the great news, is that this all gets fixed when I create a new User account, and delete the original one. So, I think I have a process that works here... the key being start with a temporary admin account, then install windows, then move c:\Users to d:\ (using robocopy and mounting the d: drive), then create a new 'real' admin account and delete the temp one.
It would be nice if Microsoft listened to their customers and made this easy. Its obvious that a lot of users would like to keep their programs and data on separate physical drives... especially anyone using a small SSD for the OS.
Unfortunately, based on other forum articles, I"m not sure this will work 100% for everything... I haven't tried a system restore (yet), and think I saw an article saying that might not work. But everything is working OK for me now. (We'll except my old work software can't read its USB Security Key and I can't find a driver that works for it in win7, but that's a separate issue... so I guess it's off to figure out XP Mode.)
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