Windows 7: Media Centre Extender - Software extender

Hi guys

i'm pretty new here having read alot of your posts i thought this would be the place to talk about my quriosity over mediacentre extenders. I work in an IT department for a company that uses SAP it was decided that we would use a TS farm to lock down the gui and release it as a remote app. kewl idea i thought so just the other day i was fighting with my Xbox again (it called me some names, but i'm the grown up in our relationship)

As usual the media centre extender had lost the connection to my PC (nothing out of the norm here) so during the trouble shooting process i noticed as i was browsing the registry that infact the media centre extender is reliant on terminal services ???

i've never put much thought to the process before but it would make since. Is the media centre extender really a remote app/remotdesktop connection. it creates a user for MCX when you set it up but this begs the question "doesnt windows termserv.dll limit concurrent sessions to 1" obviously with out the term server hack.

another thing is the bandwidth requirement of mce seeing as mediaportal can stream full hd from a DVB card in half the bandwidth that mce will display its interface i can only imagine that the screen scrape process or an RDP session produces a ridiculous amount of data but then how would you display the video is it perhaps an early form of Remote FX. in any event i see alot of people asking for a software extender. what if we dont need a software extender all we need to know is how to start the MCX session and which mstsc client we need. . .

Any Ideas ?

Just to be absolutely sure: you question boils down to this:

How to set up a MCE extender in pure software on a regular Windows PC?

Correct? If so, I'd like to know, too

I'm pretty sure that an MCE extender required Media Center on the "server" PC. For that, you need to be running a version of Windows that comes with Media Center (Ultimate, Professional, Home Premium) and Media Center needs to be enabled in control panel (Programs > turn Windows features on or off) and configured.

Probably driven more by DRM requirements than base technology (extenders have to be HDCP compliant).