Posted by Jed Lewison on Sun May 20, 2007 at 5:54 PM Pacific

Easy way to add network shares to watched folders for recorded TV on Vista Media Center

Until today, I thought that the configuring Windows Vista Media Center to watch networked locations required going into the registry and manually setting the WatchedFolders key to point to the UNC path of the share.

It turns out there's an easier way to accomplish the same thing -- and you don't have to muck around in the registry at all!

The basic idea is to create a symbolic link to the network share and then use the Media Center UI to add the new TV location. Basically, what you're doing is tricking Media Center into believing that your watched location is local when it's actually on a network. This is important because Media Center won't let you add a networked location, even if you've mapped it to a drive letter.

(Note: You still need to configure the target of the symbolic link to properly share recorded TV. Here's how to do it using Vista Home Premium.)

Here are the two registry-free steps to adding networked shares on the client side:

First:

• Open a command prompt with administrator privileges.
  • (Type command into the start menu search box, then right click on the command prompt option, and choose "Run as Administrator")
• Navigate to the location where you want to create your symbolic link.
  • (I use c:\users\public and title the links "htpc-tv" and "htpc-server".)
• To create the link, enter this command:
  • MKLINK /D "yourlinkname" "\\machinename\path"

Second:

• Open up Media Center, go to the Task menu and select the settings submenu.
• Select TV
• Select Recorder
• Select More TV Locations and select the symbolic link(s) that you created.
• Save your changes and you're done!

Now your recorded TV should show up in the recorded TV listings of Media Center!

Note that you can create a link inside of your recorded TV folder, however in a bit of testing with this approach, I determined that Media Center will probably start deleting files from your network location because it will think that too much disk space is being used by recordings. I'm not absolutely sure about this, as I didn't want to find out the hard way, but I would avoid placing symbolic links directly inside recorded TV folders. Doing so allows you to skip the second step, but risks accidental file deletions.