Disable network notification of Windows Media Player's ON status

Hi John,

As per your issue description, I understand that the Windows 8 computer is acting as a specific purpose file server. The network connection is configured with Sharing turned on, with the Private network profile in its default settings.

Hence, I would suggest you to post this question in the Windows 8 TechNet Forums: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-us/w8itpronetworking/threads

 

Thanks.

 

I did post there as well, but this is a behavior that home network users may have solved, and so I posted here also to include this audience of prospective problem-solvers.

In your Network and Sharing Center, under Advanced Sharing options, you can disable media streaming from your computer by clicking "Block All".  It will no longer advertise the availability of media streaming on your network.

 

This should also stop the "Windows Media Player Network Streaming Service", but you can run services.msc and disable this yourself if you want.

 

Alternatively, you can set it to default to "not share" and then only explicitly allow the computers/devices you want to have access.

 

Thanks, Shawn, those were just the sort of clues I was looking for.

Interestingly though, my results diverge some from what you were indicating.  As noted in the original post, Media Streaming was not turned on.  But perhaps you have to turn it on to get control of this bit of behavior.  So I turned it on, then clicked Block All and OK'd the change.  I rebooted just in case the change needed it to complete.

But at that point Windows Media Player Network Sharing service was still set to Automatic (Delayed), just as it had been initially.

And returning to the advanced settings in the Network and Sharing Center, and once again choosing to set the media streaming options under All Networks, I found that Media Streaming was not turned on (again).

So in this circumstance, it seems that setting Block All has the secondary effect of turning off Media Streaming altogether.

One thing that did work as expected was to manually Disable Windows Media Player Network Sharing via Services.msc.  (Which was a relief - I recall finding under XP that this service would mysteriously re-enable for reasons unknown.)

I see from this Technet thread https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/76cedde5-4e93-4b11-bf8b-168a41d377d7/how-do-i-turn-off-media-streaming that many Windows 7 users were having all kinds of difficulty getting Media Streaming to turn on/off and configured as desired, so maybe it's still not tamed in Windows 8.