Win 7 machine not streaming .wtv files...

Hello -

I have a desktop computer running Windows 7 (connected to a TV) and am using Windows Media Center to record and playback television shows. Everything works fine on that computer with playback onto the TV.

Recently, I bought a new Windows 8 laptop and am interested in streaming recorded shows from that Win 7 media server to the laptop (while at home and on the same network). I enabled streaming through Windows Media Player on the Win 7 machine, as per directions I found online. Basically, I opened WMP, went to Library, clicked on Recorded TV, then clicked on Streaming to allow streaming to local devices.

I find that I can stream non-.wtv files just fine. I tested with a quicktime file that I placed in my Recorded TV folder and also with the sample wildlife video file that comes preloaded with Windows. To do this, I opened WMP on my laptop, navigated to the file, and clicked open. That worked fine. But when I tried streaming a recorded TV show, it just hangs...with a perpetual "Media Changing" message and blank screen.

I thought that maybe it was some setting on my laptop, so I tried disabling the firewall on it. No luck. And I realized that the Sony TV that my Win 7 machine is connected to also supports media streaming, so I went into the TV's menus, navigated to stream from my Win 7 machine, and selected a file. Again, the .wtv files didn't stream, whereas the other video files did.

Any suggestions on what's going on, how to fix this, or maybe even how to reset everything (in case I accidentally messed up some setting)?

Thanks!

From the following link, most people are having to convert .WTV to MP4 in order to play them. They talk about the issue and why Windows can't play .WTV, while showing a few possible work around procedure's.

Why doesn't Surface support WTV files (Recorded TV from - Microsoft Community

Thanks for the response. I took a look at that thread and it seems to concern the fact that the OP's machine (a Surface RT) didn't have an MPEG2 decoder built in. I do have that decoder installed on my Win 8 machine so I think that isn't the issue.

Any other suggestions?

Try using shark's codec's

Advanced Codecs for Windows 7 and Windows 8