I have two Media Centers, each having one tuner. Most of the recording requests are submitted on the main one (in the living room) and I often wished there was an automated way to detect the recording conflicts and submit them to my other Media Center to better take advantage of it's tuner. Recording Broker is just that...
Recording Broker is an application that detects recording conflicts and submits recording requests to other brokers configured in the application. It is only available to Early Access members right now; don't worry it will be release publicly at a later date (publicly released 3/27/07) .
The solution is contains two applications, RecordingBroker.exe and RecordingBrokerService.exe. After installation Run RecordingBroker.exe and click Save to write the settings to the registry, then start the service from the Service MMC.
RecordingBroker.exe is the settings tool, use it to add brokers and configure how the service behaves.
Port - the the port the server binds to
Poll Time - how often, in seconds, WMC is polled for conflicts
Secret - because this application could theoretically be used across firewalls (if you wanted to create a relationship with a friend's WMC); this secret is used to hash a portion of the request to verify that the other broker is trusted. This must be set to the same value on all brokers.
Connection Timeout - how long the broker will wait for a server to respond before failing
Other Brokers - is a list of all the brokers that this machine has a relationship with; to add a broker enter the hostname (or dns name) of the other machine in "New Broker" and click Add.
Settings must be "Save"d before exiting. After saving settings, restart the service to have them take effect.
RecordingBrokerService.exe is a windows service that acts as a tcp server so other brokers can communicate with that machine, and also polls WMC for recording conflicts so it can send requests to other brokers.
MCE (XP) Download
WMC (Vista) Download
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