Pete, for information on how storage locations will affect your "TIVO-on-steroids" tool, please consult the ISV, as we don't support that application here (whatever it is, I don't recall if you've ever named it and it doesn't really matter) and
really can't answer that question.
Streaming: There's a decent article on streaming media
on Wikipedia. It gets a little technical, but nothing you shouldn't be able to puzzle through. The core difference between streaming and simply reading a file from a file share, though, is that in a streaming scenario, the client and server negotiate
a mutually agreeable protocol (which could be the native codec of the file on the server, or could involve some sort of transcoding, normally on the server), then data is sent from the server and rendered
in real time by the client possibly with some (usually fairly small) amount of buffering to avoid an underrun if momentary network congestion pops up. The file, however, is never accessed directly by the client; all it gets is the media
"stream".
In a scenario where the client is reading a file from a network location, the client
does directly access the file on the network share, requesting the file and moderating the data transfer itself.
Another way of looking at it is as "push" vs. "pull". Media streaming is a "push" application: data is sent from the server to the client with the server in overall control ("Here's another packet of that data you said you wanted, and another, and another").
Standard file reads are a "pull" application, where the client is in overall control ("Give me the next block of data! More! More!").
An example of streaming is Youtube, or Netflix on demand (both are "on demand" or "progressive" streaming, which involves client buffering), or broadcast TV ("live" streaming, even though the content is prerecorded for the most part). An example of a standard
file read is Windows Media Center with a network share on a basic NAS included in a media library.
I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
