I recently had an issue where media (be it music or video) stopped streaming through to my xbox360 from Windows Media Player 11 on my Vista desktop.  What made it more perplexing is that my PC could see the Xbox 360 without a problem.  I had, up until that point, been happily streaming music from my Windows Media Player Vista PC to my Xbox 360 without any problems.  The streaming issue wasn’t only limited to WMP11 though, as the Media Center extender stopped working too.

Firstly, how do you share media from your Windows PC to your Xbox 360 using Windows Media Player? Turn your 360 and PC on before opening up Windows Media Player.  I run Vista with WMP11.  Click on the drop-down arrow on the Library tab, click on Media Sharing.  At this point you might have your first point of failure – if your network is set to Public then media sharing will not be allowed.  Set it to private by clicking on the Networking button and changing the settings of your network connection.  In Windows Vista it’s as simple as clicking on the Customise link next to your applicable Network Connection and clicking on Private.  Now the previously greyed-out checkbox to “Share my media” will be available.  Check that and then add your Xbox 360 to your allowed list. (If your Xbox 360 isn’t in the list of available media, then you will have to troubleshoot why the PC cannot see the 360).

It really is that easy.  Now when you use your Xbox 360 and go to any of the media tabs you’ll have your computer listed by name as one of the devices from which you can stream media.  At least, that’s how it was for me up until recently.

I tried the following to fix the streaming issue:  shutdown my firewall completely (both on the PC and the router), opened the relevant TCP/UDP ports on the PC and the router, tried a different router, and even tried the DRM licensing tool.  None of these worked.

So what was the problem? DRM.  Evil, evil DRM!  But the DRM tool linked above didn’t work for me the way it had for others in forums.  Instead my fix was rather more mundane – I moved all of my music out of the folder that Windows Media Player watched for the library leaving it empty.  The Xbox 360 and PC were now once more on speaking terms.  I then started the process of copying album for album across into my shared folder until the offending mp3 was found.  Thank you so much, Apple, for your shitty DRM on tracks from iTunes.