Corey Gouker's Machine Inside the Mind

This is a common question on XP and even Vista. If you do a basic search with Google or Live you'll actually get mixed information with many people (including some Microsoft sources) saying that sharing of networked content is not possible. However let it be known that it is possible and this information is available directly from Microsoft's own sharing FAQ's.

If you want to share files in a monitored folder that is located on another computer (for example, a folder on a network share), the remote folder must have the appropriate Windows access permissions assigned to it and the computer that contains the library you want to share has remote content sharing enabled. You can enable remote content sharing by performing the following procedure on the computer that contains the library you are sharing.

1.	Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2.	In the registry tree (on the left), expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE, Microsoft, MediaPlayer, and then Preferences.
3.	Right-click HME, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4.	Type EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then press ENTER.
5.	Right-click EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then click Modify.
6.	In the Value data text box, type 1, and then click OK. If you later decide to disable remote content sharing, you can repeat this procedure and change the value to 0.

For more information, see Windows Media Player FAQ.

I should also note that typically you need to make sure that WMP is monitoring the network share via the UNC path so \\SERVER\Music, while you can certainly have the share mapped to a network drive this will cause issues in certain cases. So if you add M:\ for example, make sure WMP is monitoring and using \\SERVER\Music instead. Issues that come up include the networked content showing up on first use but not being able to play back, and after the machine starts the content not being up to date. For more info check out this post.