Windows Media Connect Frustrations

[Jason Dunn]

Late last year, I bought a <A HREF=http://www.rokulabs.com/products/soundbridge/models.php" target="_blank">Roku M2000</A>, which is a networked audio player that uses the Windows Media Connect foundation. Setup was a breeze, and I was amazed at how easily it worked. There are some things I dislike about the player (like how long it takes to load the browse list with 12,000 songs), but overall the hardware is pretty good. My real frustration is with the Windows Media Connect software that drives the entire process and lives on my MCE 2005 computer.<br /><br />I have two main problems: insane resource usage, and disconnecting clients. When I log onto the computer that hosts all my media files, I always cross my fingers and hope it's not going to be a "bad Windows Media Connect day". What's a bad WMC day? Today is one - for the past 15 minutes I've had my CPU gunning, with the mswmccds.exe process using up 90-99% usage, and currently consuming 130 MB of RAM. This always happens after login, it's just a question of how long it lasts. On a good day, it will settle down after a few minutes. On a bad day it will last several hours. This is the Windows Media Connect process, presumably scanning for new content and getting snagged on something along the way, then looping endlessly and chewing up CPU and RAM resources along the way. The most frustrating part? There's absolutely no tools in the WMC user interface to tell me what's going on, what files it's snagging on, etc. Talk about frustrating!<br /><br />The other problem is more directly related to the M2000 - when I turn it on, it comes out of standby and 90% of the time it says "no libraries found". This means that it's unable to find my desktop computer running the Windows Media Connect client. The only sure-fire way to get it connected again is to unplug the M2000 from power and re-connect it. After it does a full reboot it finds the computer with the media. I initially thought this was yet another problem with WMC on the desktop, but after searching the Roku forums <a href="http://www.rokulabs.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3260">it seems I'm not the only one</a> having this problem. I'm hoping to see a fix from Roku soon on this so I can get some real use out of the M2000.<br /><br />Windows Media Connect is a great <i>idea</i>, but the core technology still reeks of 1.0 issues. I'm looking forward to seeing it evolve into a more mature, stable software solution for linking media devices with home computers.

[alvinchen]

Jason,

There is a firmware update for the Roku. It adds (among other things) a reset menu option so you don't have to unplug and plug back in. I've found that the "No Libraries Found" is a thing of the past. Roku also has forms at http://www.rokulabs.com/forums/.

I agree with your assessment of WMC. It needs some work. I don't have the performance problems that you have but I believe because I store all my media in Shared Docs and don't have any that are only available when I log in. One other thing that really annoys me is what I call the "phantom app". I use Alt - Tab a lot to switch between applications and there is always this application with no name, no description, no icon. After a frustrating day of shutting down every process I could find, I discovered it was WMC.

I also wish WMC would function as some sort of streaming server as well. If I'm having a party and want my music on my Media Center to go to all my devices, but play the same song at the same time, I can't. I wish I could choose between a "pull" of media content (pulling it off my computer) which it currently does, or a "push" (where the content is pushed to my devices). That would kick ass.

Alvin