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[Cooch]

Why use media server?
Is a centralized library the only gain?
Are there any performace increases or decreases with Media Server?

I am going to run Media Center on 3 different computers all accessing a server which has the media files on a shared drive.  I understand Media Server will allow me to just maintain the library on one machine while the other 2 connect to it to get their library.  Is there any advantage to using Media Server for such a small installation or would it be just as easy to just maintain a library on all 3 machines?  Speed is my main concern here.

Don

[John Gateley]

In terms of network speed, you won't normally find a difference between Media Server and the shared network drive.

If you access the network drive from multiple machines at the same time, you may corrupt the database unless all but one of them access the drive in read-only mode.

In the future, Media Server will be able to handle play counts better, something you can't do with the shared network drive.

j

[salsbst1]

Does Media Server mode actually stream the audio files during playback?  Or can the client still read them from a shared network drive?

The reason I ask is that my file server is linux and I'd like the safety of Media Server but not at the cost of an extra network hop for every packet of the media files.

If Media Server streams, is there a possibility that a future version will server the library without serving the media? (I suppose Media Server would be a bad name for that... perhaps "Library Server").