Millions of homes have data networks, but few households refer to them that way. If you've got a broadband Internet connection and a firewall/router between it and your PC, then you have one too. Sharing the Internet, connecting with Wi-Fi, and watching kids mow down zombies at LAN parties are all good ways to use your home network. How about adding your TV and stereo to the mix?

Buy a few cables, add a Microsoft Windows Home Server (WHS) and a media extender to your network, and you can be watching recorded TV on any TV or PC in the house. You can share your playlists from the living room to the garage, and maybe even hook up your digital photo frames to your networked photo and music libraries.—Next: Tools & Components >

Tools and Components

Next: Steps 1-3 >

Steps 1-3

1) Select a Home Server
We chose to go with the new $599 HP MediaSmart as our WHS appliance for several reasons. First, it looks cool. Sticking a home-brewed PC next to our high-tech entertainment center simply wasn't good feng shui. Another reason is HD recording. The MediaSmart can go 1TB out of the box and expand further with upcoming HP internal drives or external USB drives. Unfortunately, the MediaSmart, like many of the Windows Home Server platforms you'll see coming out this year, is an appliance. This means that even though you're running a stripped-down version of Windows Server 2003, you can't just crack open these cases and add cards. To get the home server talking to the TV or cable box we're going to need some kind of TV cabling capability.

2) Connecting the TV to the Server
In addition to our method, there are other ways to manage a MediaSmart-to-TV connection, including a dedicated Vista PC with an HDMI hook-up or a USB-based TV-to-PC cable that has a Windows Home Server driver. Neither seemed reliable at the time we started this project, so we chose a safer route. To connect the MediaSmart to the TV we decided to use a media extender, namely the SageTV Media Extender ($199, www.sagetv.com). This box will connect our TV and our home network, providing the audio and video feeds for every SageTV Media Server and Client installed on the home network. The HP MediaSmart will act as our central storage repository.

3) Set Up Windows Home Server
If there's one thing that Microsoft has done right in the past year, it's making Windows Home Server easy to configure. Even with HP modifying the code a little, setup very quickly walks you through activating the server, setting up user accounts, and configuring permissions to various folders. There's a lot more to WHS, but for the purposes of acting as a media file repository, that's all we need to worry about.

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Next: Steps 4-7 >

Steps 4-7

4) Install the Media Server Software on a Windows PC
At this point we need to install the SageTV Media Server package on a machine in your home network. That gives this system the ability to find the Media Extender on the network automatically, access all the TV content and all the Sage media content, schedule recordings, and manage playback.

5) Install the Media Extender
Once you have installed all the appropriate software, it's time to get the SageTV Media Extender up and running. Connect the Media Extender to your TV or home-theater equipment with the appropriate connectors (we used HDMI); also connect it to your home network with standard Ethernet cable. Run through the installation process, making sure that a SageTV Media Server is running on a Windows machine elsewhere on the network.

6) Make Windows Home Server the Back-end of Choice
Once your Media Extender and your Media Server machine are both on the network, they'll find each other automatically. There's some setup to go through in terms of available content, but it's all menu-driven. The last bit of configuration you'll need to do is to make the Windows Home Server the automatic repository of recorded TV. You can do this by changing the target directories in your Media Center software. Alternatively, you can leave your recordings on your media-server machine and have Windows Home Server automatically back them up. Then you can delete older files yourself to keep the Media Server's hard disks from filling up.

7) Record and Play
You're good to go. Use your Media Server software to access content from any PC on the home network, or use any TV equipped with a Media Extender to access that content as well. In the future, you'll see more Windows Home Server appliances with Media Server software and TV tuner capability already built in, but for now, dropping a $199 media extender in the middle really isn't that nasty a chore.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.