I’ve been doing a lot of tinkering with Windows 7 recently. What I really like about it is that it has made it very easy to share media on your home network.

Much of this is due to HomeGroup, which is an extremely user-friendly network setter-upper which make sharing libraries between Windows 7 PCs on your home network a snap.

The best part, though, is once the HomeGroup is set up, Windows Media Center will automatically discover the shared libraries. If I go into My Pictures in 7MC, for example, a <shared> option appears on the pivot menu, showing me the picture libraries on other PCs on my network. Same goes for music, videos, even recorded TV.

Libraries on older Vista and XP PCs can be shared as well; you just have to manually set them up by sharing the relevant folders individually.

In addition, Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center will automatically discover shared libraries from Windows Media Player 11 and 12, Windows Home Server AND from any DLNA-compliant media servers.

DLNA stands for Digital Living Network Alliance, and basically it sets standards that makes networking and sharing among home devices and PCs direct and efficient. I’ll cover it in detail in a future post – suffice it to say, it’s natively supported in Windows 7 and the benefits it will reap are huge.  Huge.

These advances in Windows 7 will go along way to making all of your media available anywhere on your home network on a wide variety of devices. It’s set for release Oct. 22, just 120 days from the tie of this writing. And yes, I am counting.

Still on the Win7 Beta1?

If you are still running the Windows 7 beta 1 (build 7000, released this past January 9), you need to switch to the Windows 7 Release Candidate ASAP. Beta 1 expires on August 1, 2009! And, downloads of the RC (build 7100) end on August 15. From the Windows Springboard blog:

Want to download the RC? . The RC download program closes August 15th. After that, you won’t be able to get the download, but you can still install the RC and get a key if you need one. (To get a key, just go to the Downloads page and follow the instructions.)