Sharing media across a network should be easy, I mean it is 2008 for God sakes! One problem I ran across recently with Windows Media Player is that it simply does pick up all the file changes in the folders that it is monitoring. Specifically, Windows Media Player won’t add new media from the folders it is monitoring when the media file becomes available by renaming. It works perfectly fine when you copy or move the file into the folder that is being monitored. But when that file already exists with an unknown extension and is then renamed with a media extension the change isn’t detected by Windows Media Player and so the file isn’t added to your media library and isn’t available for viewing across the network.

I encountered the problem when I had uTorrent downloading files into a folder that was being monitored by Windows Media Player. In uTorrent I had the files created with the “.!ut” extension. Then when the download was completed uTorrent would simply rename the file from “.!ut” to “.wmv” or whatever the original extension was. So when the file is first created by Windows Media Player it looks at it and sees that it is a “.!ut” extension and doesn’t know what to do with it. Then when the file is renamed Windows Media Player simply doesn’t monitor the change. And so the only way to get Windows Media Player to add the file into the media library is to go into the user interface and force it to manually update and if that doesn’t work then to restart the Windows Media Player Network Sharing service.

However I’ve come up with a solution and that is to use uTorrent to save the new downloads in a separate folder and then move them over into the folder that Windows Media Player is monitoring once the download is complete. So in uTorrent if you goto Preferences->Directories and check “Put new downloads in” you could set it to “c:\incomplete\” and then set “Move completed downloads to” say “c:\downloads\”. You might also want to turn off the option in Preferences->General for “Append .!ut to incomplete files” cause I never tested it with it on since there is no need to have it on since all incomplete files are in a totally separate folder.

At the time it was really annoying to have to manually force Windows Media Player to update the media library. I checked Google several times with no answers. I came to the end of my ropes, but when I finally figured out why the heck Windows Media Player wasn’t doing its job it was like a light blub turned on inside my head. Was all of this by design? Who knows. Who cares. It works now and that is all that matters.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 16th, 2008 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.