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When is "play to" enabled / disabled on windows 7 media player?

When is "play to" enabled / disabled on windows 7 media player?

I've got several windows 7 machines now, and an xbox 360. I've noticed that sometimes the "play to" option is available, and sometimes it's not. If I open up media player on one machine, and I've got the streaming options set with the proper permissions for that machine to allow from the other, it seems to show up and work (but only sometimes)

Asked by: Guest | Views: 335
Total answers/comments: 1
Guest [Entry]

"The PlayTo menu will not be available if there are no Digital Media Renderer devices available to your network. The menu becomes available to you sometimes becuase you had probably turned on a Windows Media Player somewhere in your network and this one was configured to act as a DMR.
WMP on the other side does not act a service. It is just a player so you have to instatiate the application before being able to control it over the wire.
XBOX360 it is not a standlone DMR. It becomes a DMR only when it is in the media extender mode. Otherwise it is just a player that it can pull content from a Windows server (this is why you can see it in the permisions list). However, outside of the extender mode it does not exposes the UPnP services required to be controlled over the wire."