Win 7 WMC VM recording to network drive on same hardware

Talk about setting up your home network.
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GreenMachine

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Win 7 WMC VM recording to network drive on same hardware

#1

Post by GreenMachine » Fri Apr 28, 2017 1:59 pm

If you try to record to a NAS over a network with this it's going to give you huge headaches. Network traffic will cause your video to jitter and freeze due to inconsistency in speed. This is why MS doesn't all you to do it. (very easily, lol)

BUT, if you're running Win 7 WMC in a VM that's on top of a NAS, and you're not leaving the hardware with the network drive, this works very well. A hell of a lot better than a dynamic virtual drive, which chokes video as well, and a lot better than creating a static virtual drive which defeats the purpose of a NAS. It's very easy, and this is how you do it.

1. Build your Win 7 VM, and create an extra virtual drive for recording. Dynamic is fine, because with this it won't grow anyway. At least 100gb, because whatever size you create is the size Windows will believe it has to record/buffer with. Once you have Win 7 running, connected to your tuner, and recording to that second virtual drive, which for our purposes today we'll call "F", move to step 2.

2. Close the WMC gui, and go into the Ctrl Panel/Admin Tools and open "Services". Go down to the Windows Media services, and stop them all. Once they are stopped, go to step 3.

3. Go to your F drive and delete the folder "Recorded TV". This will only delete if you stop those services.

4. Open an elevated DOS window. (Start > Type CMD, right click on it, and Run as Administrator.

5. In the dos window, input this line....
mklink /D "F:\Recorded TV\" "\\yourserver\yourshare\"

6. Start WMC. To start WMC, just go to the Start menu and click the icon like you always would.

7. Find a program, and try to record it for a minute or two. Once it stops, check the network folder directly. Meaning, browse to the share on your NAS, don't double click the symbolic link you just made on your F drive. If the recording is there, you're done.

FYI security is your issue. I tested this with a wide open NAS share, and it worked. What I'll probably do is set the VM to automatically login as a user, create that user on the NAS, and then lock the share to just that user. But security is up to you.

DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME trying to do this over an actual network. VM to the host NAS is nothing like your local network other than you're using the TCP stack to accomplish the task. You can try it, but don't come crying here about it because I'll laugh heartily at you. No, not just a giggle. Think big belly laugh like Burl Ives dressed up as Santa Claus. Good luck!

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Crash2009

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#2

Post by Crash2009 » Sun Apr 30, 2017 4:57 am

Thanks, you make it sound so easy.

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