[yunti]

I've recently put together a new computer which I intend you also use for serving up media to a few xbmc clients around the house.

I'm looking for the best (inc simplest and most reliable) method to serve media to the clients (most on windows 7 one is a mac).

The new (server) pc is running windows 7 64bit (i5 2300 based pc) and will also sometimes be used as a desktop for light office work browsing, so something that doesn't interfere with that would be ideal.

I was thinking of using DLNA with something like tversity (but at times it's proved unreliable in the past).

Are there much better options than this?

Thanks.

[dirtymurt]

share the folders is the simplest method. if like me, you struggled getting your macs to see the smb shares, i grabbed a copy of a great prog called extremez-ip which made the windows server act like a mac server braodcasting afp shares of the same shared folders.

[yunti]

Thanks for the tip. That worked great with windows, just set up a very simple homegroup and right click any folder that I wanted to share to 'share with homegroup'. Couldn't be simpler.

I haven't sorted the mac side yet. I can see the server in 'finder' but no folders, but it's likely due to permissions, but will try again over the weekend.

[Nhilar]

For serving files with Windows environment I would recommend something like Windows Server 2008 R2 (or a flavor of WHS works too, or Linux -< set-up is a bit harder). Here is the problem with using Windows 7 Ultimate or such – they are limited to 20 or so connections and have a very bad habit of NOT releasing connections, thus requiring a reboot. Further, each computer connecting to the server can use multiple connections. I found serving with a desktop OS to be very unreliable. It is very easy to hit the 20 connection limit with 2 computers, and then things will simply not work right, you’ll think something failed but really you’ve hit the connection limit.

-Nhilar