Setup Windows 7 as a DVR and media center extender

We use a PC with a TV tuner card as our DVR. We don't subscribe to any cable. That part works great. I got to thinking, what would be really cool is if I hook up a laptop to our upstairs TV using hdmi and be able to watch our recorded shows on the tv upstairs. I was thinking I could set it up like what I keep on hearing this Media Center extender. But it kept on asking me for some code that it said was supposed to be showing on my TV... but both the downstairs TV and the upstairs TV are just PCs and they both want the code... neither are giving me a code.

So, what I did was just browse to the folder on the downstairs PC from the upstairs one and tried to just play video that it recorded. It works, but not well at all. These shows are recording in HD, so the files are a few gigs a piece for a 30 minute show. I'm transfering it over 802.11g, which it's probably not even running at 54 Mb/s. It runs extremely choppy. I got to thinking, I'll just copy the file local so I could play it. It was going to take about 1.5 hours to transfer a 30 minute show, which explains my wireless is too slow to stream it.

How do others do this? If I had it setup as a media extender, would it have a way to compress the video or transfer it more efficiently? How do others do this?

As convient as 802.11g is it's pretty useless for streaming video, especially HD. An 802.11n network might perform a bit better but if you want reliability you can't beat a wired network. If i was you i'd configure your media libraries on the laptop to access your media centre recorded TV folders on the downstairs pc. i dont' think you can treat a win7 box as an extender as such.