No video on browser interface?

New here so bear with me, tried searching and did not find anything so sorry if it is a repost too.

I am trying to setup xbmc on my laptop to test it and learn to configure it before I install it onto my server.

I switched it to the home interface to Home Row (the only one to let me go into "video files" and view my folders and thus videos), but when I go to stream a video it opens on the main computer via xbmc (the one that opened the file gets neither a picture nor sound), even if the remote computer that tries this is not on the same network.

Thanks for any ideas. Fyi I am using xbmc 12, windows 7 x64, i7, 8gb ram, integrated video HD4k.