I have 2 MCE machines at home. The main one in the lounge, which is our 'media hub' and another in my study, which is also my PC to do the normal stuff anyone else does with these lovely little things.

I have MCE 2005 installed on both machines and I wanted to be able to view the Recorded TV from the machine in the lounge on the machine in my study. I tried to use a program such as "Share Recorded TV" but I could not get it to work. I think that it is due to the new security settings in Windows XP SP2 that it would not work so I had to come up with another way.

I used the following process to share recorded TV between 2 MCE 2005 machines.

From now on in this post, I will refer to the MCE machine as the 'server' and the normal PC with MCE installed as the 'client'.

1. Share your Recorded TV folder on the server. You can name the share the default, "Recorded TV" if you want. I called mine Recorded_TV$.
   
2. Grant 'Everyone' full control on both the share level and security level. You may only see the Security tab if you disable simple file sharing. You can do that by opening Windows Explorer, click Tools > Options, click View, scroll to bottom of list and uncheck Use simple file sharing (Recommended). When you grant Everyone full control make sure you apply the settings to the child objects.
3. Create a user on your server that has the exact same name, username and password as the one on your client.  I use the same username to logon to both but use an autologon on the main MCE machine so I don't have to type it everytime.
4. Open Local Security Policy (Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Local Security Policy.) and go to Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options.
5. Find Network access: Let Everyone permissions apply to anonymous users. Open that up, and change the setting to Enabled. This only needs to be done on the server machine.
6. Find Network access: Shares that can be accessed anonymously. Open that up, and add the name of the share that you created earlier. This only needs to be done on the server machine. Mine looks as follows:
   
   COMCFG
   DFS$
   Recorded_TV$
   
7. Find Network access: Sharing and security model for accounts. Open that up, and change the setting to Classic - local users authenticate as themselves. This only needs to be done on the server machine, although I do this on all my XP machines so that I do not get prompted for a username and password when I connect to the default shares.
8. On the client machine open regedit, and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Recording.  Find the key WatchedFolders and open it up. Add a new line to this entry at the bottom, pointing to the servers Recorded TV share.  Mine looks as follows:
   
   C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Recorded TV\othermachinename\Recorded_TV$ 
   
   If you are not compfortable editing the registry this setting, as well as loads more, can also be set using the TweakMCE utility from Microsoft.
9. Check that the Windows firewall is either turned off (I would not recommend this) or is set to allow file sharing through.
10. Reboot your server and client. Check your Recorded TV on your client. Within a few seconds recorded shows from the server MCE should show up on the client MCE.

That's it.  You are done.

Enjoy!