I came across a post at thegreenbutton awhile back with the above title. This guy supposedly stumbled onto a softsled like solution using windows vista. Read his post below.

Here's my setup: My main living room PC is the ole' MCE '05 (MCE) equipped with a TV tuner and lot's of storage. In my other room I have a Vista MCE (VMC??) that acts as a client to the living room MCE05 and has NO tuner installed.

I've setup the appropriate sharing and security permission to share my Recorded TV on the MCE05 as per previous guides. On the VMC I started using Vista's sexy new "symbolic linking" (or the mklink command) where you can make vista think that a network share is just a local folder on the machine. So anyway, I did this to the "Recorded TV" directory and it was working for a few months, but then suddenly my Recorded TV on VMC wasn't refreshing with new shows until I did a reboot. I did some troubleshooting and still could not fix the problem. Finally, I decided to share the folder that houses the "Recordings.xml" under "c:\docs and settings\All Users\App Data\Ehome\Recording" on the MCE05 machine. Now this time I decided to also mklink this share to my VMC...and then Viola my recordings started refreshing properly on the VMC machine. BUUUUT, I also noticed an interesting thing, when I would go to the program info page for a show, the "Series Info" button showed up...and it didn't do this before. I could then go into this and change the series settings and even cancel them. But since I haven't installed a tuner on this machine yet I don't have any Guide info and can't do things like look at "Other showings", resolve conflicts, and look at "Scheduled Recordings.

So my question to you guys is: If we were to mklink "Recorded TV", "Recordings.xml" and the EPG data on a client VMC wouldn't this effectively enable sharing the TV shows, series settings, and guide information between two media centers? If this worked we would have pretty much a softsled-like solution with the "Live TV" still lacking.

The only reason I haven't got the guide setup yet is because I presume once this happens I will start getting "Failed Recording" messages on the VMC since there is no tuner. Is there a way to bypass this with a virtual tuner or perhaps the "Recording Broker" program?

Original Post at the Green Button

I am really surprised that it has only three comments. I don't use Windows Vista so I can't test this out. Has anyone else been able to replicate what this user has done?