Shared Guide Brings Softsled One Step Closer

Softsled was a rumored product/feature from Microsoft that would essentially allow you to use a Windows Media Center PC as an Extender to another PC. While features like Windows 7 Libraries and networked tuners have gone a long way to bring that vision to a reality, there has always been one missing piece: a shared guide. It’s not hard to setup shared media libraries to watch recorded TV from another home theater PC  on your network, but what if that HTPC is the only machine with tuners on it and you’d like to record something without having to go to that computer to schedule it? Well, a developer going by the name sccrgoalie1 over at theGreenButton.tv has posted a Shared Guide plugin for Media Center that makes this all possible.

To get started you’ll need to already have Remote Potato setup on your primary home theater PC. Once that is complete install this plugin on your secondary machine. Simply configure the plugin within Media Center by telling it the address of the Remote Potato computer, and provide login details if they are required. Then you can also specify whether you want to display the entire guide or just the favorites that you’ve defined in Remote Potato. After configuring it launch the Shared Guide from the Media Center start menu and you’ll be greeted with a guide that looks almost identical to the standard Windows Media Center guide, only this guide will be displaying data from the machine running Remote Potato. If the remote machine has items scheduled to record in the guide you’ll see the red recording dot in this guide also. It also provides the ability to schedule recordings by selecting the items in the grid and choosing to record the entire series or just that episode. One interesting feature is that if you have a tuner in the machine you are viewing from, and you select an item in the guide that is currently on, and you have access to that channel on the computer, it will start playing it locally. It seems a little odd at first, because everything else that is done through Shared Guide happens on the remote Media Center.

So if the ability to have one central Media Center that handles of your home’s recording duties and being able to manage the recording schedule from within a separate Media Center sounds like something you’ve been looking for then definitely check out this plugin. In the short amount of time we spent with it we didn’t notice any glaring bugs with the plugin.

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Source: The Green Button.tv