Media streaming is a hot topic among WHS users. There are many programs and devices out there all vying to be your media application of choice. One such program is a WHS add-in called WebGuide for Windows Home Server. This add-in enables you to remotely access, listen, watch and stream your music, photos and videos stored on your home server while away from home.
Installing the add-in is as simple as any other add-in. Copy the msi installer to your D:Software/Add-ins folder, open the WHS Settings dialog in the console and install the software from the Add-ins tab, as shown below.
Once installed, the add-in needs to be configured to work with WHS. Open the WHS Setting window and click on the Webguide icon.
Clicking on the Configure WebGuide button brings you to this window. You will need to enter the administrator password at this point. You can either click on the Start button to automatically configure WebGuide or click on the Advanced button to configure the options manually.
I chose the Start (automatic) method originally to see what problems WebGuide might report to me. Sure enough, WebGuide reported that I needed to configure a router port on my router. My router is not PnP, so off I went to complete that little task.
Clicking on OK brings you to this screen.
Once back in the console, I returned to the WebGuide configuration screen to see what was in the advanced screen. The following pictures gives you an idea of what WebGuide requires and what it can do for you. Tool tips help you along the way.
There is a Help option to explain what everything does for you. This brings you to a wiki on the author’s website. Unfortunately, there is nothing specific to the WHS version of WebGuide.
So, we are now ready to try out the add-in. Actually, the answer is perhaps. If all you have are files that Windows Media Player recognizes natively, yes. If not, you would have to download a codec package and install that. For the moment, let’s assume that we have WMP compatible files only and see how the add-in works.
Remote log on to your WHS. You will notice a new icon under Web Sites. Click on the WebGuide icon
which will bring you to this screen. Clicking on the Pictures button
brings you here. From here you can peruse your picture folders as desired. You will notice along the top that there are options to go from Pictures to Music and Videos directly. Going to the Music page
brings you here. Since this was the first time I opened WebGuide, it was in the process of cataloging the music folders.
Once cataloged, you will see something similar to this:
Clicking on a song/album will highlight the item at the bottom of the page. From here, you can create a playlist, stream the song in a player built into WebGuide or download it to listen in WMP.
The first time you use the streaming option, you will be asked to choose a bandwidth, as can be seen below.
The following picture is what you will get when using the built-in player.
It was now onto the video section. This is where I ran into all sorts of problems. I rip my DVD’s using the native TS/VOB format. I have no idea if this contributed to my problem. Perhaps it may have been the result of that I do not have my soundcard enabled on my WHS, or perhaps something else. I did install the correct codecs to be able to view these movies, but I was still unable to get this section of WegGuide to work. The following picture illustrates what I saw. I returned several times to this area, and nothing changed. I was able to get to one point where it got down to 7 items waiting to load, but WebGuide caused me more serious problems.
As can be seen in the following picture, a network service became a bit heavy on usage. It actually may have been higher, except I also run BOINC on my WHS. It pegs in at about 50% CPU usage, also. Between the 2, my CPU was running constantly at 100%. When I took this picture, I had shut down BOINC to see it the network service usage would climb higher. It did not, but if I left it there long enough, it may have taken more.
Killing the service caused me all sorts of havoc. I would have to restart my WHS. Trying to go to a different section of WebGuide became impossible if I left it in the video section too long. And the network service CPU usage did not decrease. To put it mildly, not a good thing.
And that is about all there is to the add-in. It has lots of potential. It works and yet it does not. Codecs are perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of Windows. I rip my CD’s in FLAC format, and I could never get WebGuide to see them, only the mp3 files that I have on my WHS. I suppose it is possible that if I looked long enough on the WebGuide website and/or in the WebGuide forums, I may have been able to find an answer to my problem. In the words of Willy Wonka, “So much time and so little to do”
One must remember that one of the major criteria I have when I look at an add-in is how easy is it to get working. I just cannot see the Average Consumer getting very far with this add-in. Of course, it is possible that other users may have a different experience than I. And it may depend partially upon what video/audio formats a person uses.
Perhaps an indication of where this program stands is that it was released in January 2008. An update to this program is sorely needed, in my opinion.
Author: Doug Berrett
Version Reviewed: 4.113
Release: 18Jan2008
30. December 2008 at 4:55 pm
I just wanted to note that Doug Barrett, the author of WebGuide now works for Microsoft and has been working on a lot of the streaming capabilities for the next round of WHS. That would explain why the last release was in January.
I love this add-in, and am hard pressed to find another that has the same functionality for the current WHS release.
Erik
30. December 2008 at 5:34 pm
MS must keep their programmer busy. Between Doug and Brendan Grant, they seem to have pretty much disappeared from the WHS add-in scene.
It has a lot of nice features. And it works, for the most part. Perhaps when we get a good look at Windows 7 Media Center, we will see some of Doug’s work there.
30. December 2008 at 6:15 pm
I see WebGuide WHS hasn’t changed much since its early days. Still not working properly…
30. December 2008 at 6:27 pm
In theory this is a great add-in. However as mentioned setup is incredibly troublesome, but I finally got my video working after weeks of tinkering and was very happy. However due to lack of development on this add-in and the excellent ORB (see wiki installation tutorial) I changed my streaming application and have never looked back. Needs a lot of work to be ready for use out of the box which it doesn’t look like getting any time soon.
30. December 2008 at 7:15 pm
I’m fairly convinced that we will see some variant of this integrated into WHS/Live Mesh in the future. At PDC, they demo’d a WebGuide type app using Live Mesh. My chief complaint with WebGuide is that the WHS version does not support Live TV and the user interface just adds to the existing Media Center/XBox/Zune interfaces we see everyday. In my opinion, these can be remedied. Already, we are seeing Microsoft put effort into bridging XBox/Zune interfaces. Windows 7 – Media Center – Music seems to have Zune’s MixView. Hopefully Microsoft will continue down this path of interface unification. Now, Live TV is more technically challenging and one that hasn’t much attention at all. You will often see the Media Center community raise the issue of software based extender for PCs. Basically, they want to use that beautiful laptop they just bought as an extender to watch Live TV around the home. You can’t do that today..while products like BeyondTV and SageTV do. My gut tells me that we will see Media Center ported to WHS in 2010 (v2 WHS Premium) so WHS will serve hardware extenders, PCs and mobile devices. Keep your fingers crossed and be patient.
30. December 2008 at 8:41 pm
I’ve tried WebGuide, but I just couldn’t seem to get it to work reliably through my company firewall. I’ve since found 2 options for streaming music that work flawlessly with my WHS (HP EX470). The first is jukefly (www.jukefly.com). You install a small (1MB ish) efficient server program on the WHS. It scans the media on your computer and uploads your library info (most likely XML data) to your jukefly account. Then you can log in to http://www.jukefly.com from anywhere, which even works through my company firewall because I can customize the firewall port and jukefly has its own proxy server. Interface for the site is impressive.
The other I’ve been using is subsonic. Same idea with this one–install the server program and log in through a website. This one was a little more difficult to set up in my opinion, but offers a lot more flexibility–comes with transcoders to stream almost any type of music formats you have (including flac), or if needed and you know anything about it, you can provide your own transcoder. Subsonic has been slightly more reliable for me, but I like the interface of jukefly just a little bit more.
I hope that helps someone out.
31. December 2008 at 6:08 pm
I tried this waaaaay back when it came out and this is the same version. Very nice edition to WHS. BUT, it is plagued with problems and installation is a pain. The photo and music option worked good for me, but the video would not work. Not to mention the load it puts on the server to encode any video you try to stream, but that is to be expected with software encoding.
Nice program, just needs fine tuned some more. As others stated, the author has been tied up with MS doing other projects. Maybe someday this will be updated…
2. January 2009 at 2:31 pm
The Webguide add-in works great. I installed it the other day and,like others, had some difficulty getting it working. After an hour though, it was smooth sailing. Here are three tips that should make the install painless:
1. Install Cyberlink powerdvd 7 trial to get the video codecs installed. Choose this codec from the configuration screen.
2. Install the AC3 filter pack for the audio codec. Make sure to select it from the config screen.
3. Install 2 GB of Ram in the server. Using the 512MB that shipped with my EX470 just wouldn’t work for video streaming.
This is a great add-in and even though I have only been using it for two days, I really enjoy it.
6. January 2009 at 1:49 am
I love this addin, but it is a bit clunky and the streaming never seems to work. I am very hopeful that these guys are at work on a good update, because I’ve always considered that (if done right) something like Webguide could be one of those “killer apps” for the WHS.
18. August 2009 at 4:44 pm
Okay, just added webguide to my acer aspire H340 last night. Playing with it today. It basically seems to work, but as Kevin mentioned, it's a bit clunky… For example, there's no playlist support, no search capability, and some of the album covers are completely wrong. Streaming works okay for audio, but video stutters (I have FIOS, which as a 5mbps upstream). I guess the slick version of this will be coming with the next iteration of WHS (version 2.0 – sometime in 2010?). In the meantime, I'll check out some of the alternatives mentioned above and also shoutcast + winamp.
11. January 2010 at 9:29 am
I have it installed but I can't use it.
For you to use webguide you need to create a user account and enable remote connection for the user so that user can log to the server.
When user connect to server to access webguide unfortunately user get access to all albums you have in HP Photo Viewer created by other users and he can delete all of them even if he hasn’t created them, there are not restrictions for HP photo users
It would be useful if webguide has a logging link in the window home server page just to get access to webguide stuff