Windows media player/home server problem

["Jim" <james@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've just bought the HP Mediasmart server to centralise and serve all
of my media files.
The installation/setup and configuration all went perfectly, and I'm
very impressed: My PCs back-up OK; I can browse my photo library and
my music library on any PC on my network - including my Ubuntu PC. And
of course, play them with a suitable media player (in my case VLC or
mediamonkey). In addition, when i turned on my Playstation3, the media
server was just "there" and i can stream my videos and audio and
look
at my photos via the ps3.

Now the bad news:
I want to stream the media from the server (i.e. the HP Mediasmart
box, running windows Home Server) to Windows Media Player 11 on my PCs
(they run XP): BUT WMP11 won't see the Windows server on the HP box.
I did a lot of googling and eventually found a Microsoft technical
brief that told me exactly how to setup WMP11 to do this:
Right-click "Now Playing" and select "More options"
Click the "Library" tab
Click "Configure sharing"
Select the "Find media that others are sharing" check box.

Sounds simple and i went through the procedure:
BUT, my "Configure sharing" window doesn't have a "Find
media that
others are sharing" check box: it only has a "share media"
check box.

I've just done a clean install of XP and WMP11 on a laptop for my
bedroom, and it exhibits exactly the same problem.

The fact that I can see the folders and play the content from all of
my pcs, and that i can see and use the media server from my PS3
indicates that all of the server-side and network thingies are
competely OK.

What am i doing wrong?

As I don't really like WMP anyway, is there another DLNA compliant
software player that I can use as the client on my pcs?

Hope you understand this, I'm not sure I do...









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