This post is intended as a rough guide for those intending to implement a Linksys extender with their Vista Media Centre. It does not cover all aspects or issues but deals with the specific issues that confronted me in getting the most out of my DMA2200. Note that my MCE machine was updated with Vista SP1 RTM prior to installation and there may be differences where a machine is not updated to the same level.
Setup.
Since setup appears to be very straightforward if you follow the provided directions I will not repeat them all here. The only points I will make are that I believe it is probably important to close the ehome interface on your MCE machine before connecting the extender as on mine, it set it up before I even installed the software provided by Linksys. If this happens it doesn't really seem to matter as I installed the Linksys software after without any apparent problems. The installation instructions seem to say that you need to run windows update post installation but on my machine (possibly because of SP1) it found no updates.
For the record my DMA2200 is hard wired with cat5 cable so unfortunately I cannot answer any questions in regard to wireless setup but suffice to say I'm not a big fan of wireless networking in any event.
Anyway, assuming you have managed to get the extender set up according to the instructions there are a number of issues to address:
Power Management
At this point in time I have disabled S3 suspend and my MCE machine is always on. My understanding is that if your NIC supports wake on ping then you will be able to enable S3 (or other) sleep but at this point I have not got around to investigating on my system. Unfortunately the DMA2200 does not support standard WOL or magic packet functionality. My hope is that a later firmware update might rectify this oversight.
see my update below
Watched Folders
Watched folders local to your MCE machine and to shares on some unsecured NAS devices are supported out of the box but you may have a bit of a job if you have shares on another Windows based machine which contain your media files. At inception, shares on my Western Digital My Book NAS were available but no windows shares could be browsed. The issue here is that there is no simple way to give the user account that the extender uses to log into windows rights on another windows box which requires windows authentication. Local files and folders do not suffer from this problem because the account surprisingly is created as an Administrator account but the problem is that you cannot easily work out its password and so it is far easier to set up a logon script allowing that account to impersonate another. In order to facilitate this impersonation you will need to create a batch file with contents similar to the code shown below.
Before creating this logon script file there are a couple of other matters to deal with. Firstly you must arm yourself with a valid windows user name and password which has rights to the shared folders on the machine containing the shares you want your extender to access. To simplify this will most likely be the account under which the MCE machine itself runs. Record this username and password for later use.
If your MCE machine is Vista Home Premium edition as mine is you will need access to another machine on your network which has access to the "Users and Groups" snap-in for Windows Management Console. This is not available under Vista Home premium but is available from any XP Pro or Vista Ultimate machine amongst others. (Edit: There is a
shareware tool available here for use on Vista Home Premium which will allow access to user accounts.) The reason for this is that there is no way to access the user account which the extender logs on with other than with that snap-in in order to confirm its name and to insert the logon script filename. For the purposes of this guide I have described the Management Console under XP Pro but I imagine it will be quite similar under Vista Ultimate etc. Note that the most likely candidate for performing this task is the windows machine on which the shares reside as it will generally have access to everything you need.
In order to determine the account name, select "Computer Management" from the "Administrative Tools" folder under the Control Panel. From the "Actions" menu select "connect to another computer" and insert the network name of your MCE machine and click OK. You should now be connected to the MCE machine and any settings you change will be valid for that machine. In the left pane expand "Local Users and Groups" and click on Users. In the right pane you should see the list of valid users on your MCE machine. If you have only one extender the account you are looking for will most likely be named MCX1. For additional extenders the number on the end will increment. For the purposes of this guide henceforth we will assume the account name is MCX1. Right click on the MCX1 account icon and select properties. Select the profile tab at the top of the dialog and type mcx1.bat in the box labelled "Logon Script". Click OK and exit the management console.
On the MCE machine browse to the C: drive using Windows Explorer and create a folder called "netlogon". Share the folder with its default share name (netlogon) ensuring that you assign full control to "everyone".
Create a batch file called MCX1.BAT witgh code similar to that below and place it in the netlogon folder.
Code:
net use m: /delete /yes
net use m: "\\windowsmachinename\sharename" /user:username password
Note: In the above code make the following substitutions:
a. windowsmachinename = The network name of the machine containing the shares.
b. sharename = The name of the share to map to.
c. username = The name of a valid windows user account on the machine containing the shares.
d. password = The valid password of the account nominated.
For each share you should duplicate the two lines shown substituting the valid share name and allocating a unique and unused drive letter to map to. Personally I use M: for music, V: for Vide and P: for pictures just because it makes them easy to remember.
This file can be created using notepad or any standard text editor.
Once all of the above steps have been performed, restart the extender and you should now be able to add any mapped shares as watched folders for your media.
Note that if your media shares contain numerous video files of varying codecs you will find some limitations in the supported formats. DVR-MS, MPEG and Xvid are supported although Xvid with AC3 audio is not. I am told DivX files without AC3 audio can be made to work by changing their FourCC code to Xvid but at this stage I have not tested this. Strangely my preliminary testing seems to indicate some problem with WMV which I would have expected to work without issue. I will have to do some more research on this as time progresses.
My Movies
Whilst some users have reported issues with My Movies Version 2.42, these did not eventuate in my situation. What did become obvious for me though was that my dvd folders were located on my NAS device which has a mapping to V: on the MCE box. When I added these DVD folders using the collection manager I had browsed to the V: drive to locate them. Given that my extender did not have mappings to the NAS shares, (as said earlier there was no need for mappings on my NAS as the extender had no problems connecting to them) I needed to change the folder pointers in the underlying database to use UNC names to locate them. (i.e. Change "V:\foldername\" to "\\NAS\sharename\foldername\") In the end this was achieved fairly easily using the collection manager. After selecting one movie and changing the disk location to it's UNC equivalent, the tool then prompted me to change the location of all movies in the same folder. It is important to note though that the UNC cannot simply be typed in, you must use the browse tool to point to the folder under My Network places in order for it to prompt to change all movies in the database.
The one shortcoming of My Movies on the extender is that the DVD must be ripped to a compatible format in order for the Extender to play it. At this stage I am going with DVR-MS as it provides maximum compatibility without losing functionality. Later on I would like to find a way to compress these files but I would not be keen to go with Xvid until/unless Linksys eventually provide support for AC3 audio with Xvid and/or DivX.
If anyone else has any tips or tricks or recommendations please feel free to add them to this thread.
P.S. Many thanks to logifuse, merovingian, dgaust and shoreline for their input!
