Slashdot Mirror

I would take a look at Tversity. I've used it for going on 5 years and haven't had any problems streaming to any device (except for iOS devices when they decided to make that a Pro feature only :\ )

I have a pogoplug but was not particularly impressed with it. The main problem was that it was super slow. I don't know if it was just my ISP or if it's routing everything through pogoplug servers (I'd heard the latter) but I'd be lucky to get 30kbs on it from a computer on the other side of the city. The other problem is it has (or at least had) a bunch of bugs in it, and the web interface was brutal.
I replaced it with a $100 desktop i bought from the recycling depot and run an FTP and subsonic on it for hosting music. I find this much more effective than the pogoplug was, although maybe if I'd had more patience I could have gotten it to work better. It also allowed me to install tversity to stream movies to my play station. They aren't FOSS, but they are free and I'm very happy with subsonic and tversity so far.

It's a dang cheap way to get your stuff on your bigger screens, provided you're willing to jump through the necessary hoops.

Roku Box or WDTV, anyone? No hoops to jump through there...or, if you have an Xbox 360 or PS3, TVersity is a FANTASTIC solution.

No content.

Roku Box or WDTV, anyone? No hoops to jump through there...or, if you have an Xbox 360 or PS3, TVersity is a FANTASTIC solution.

By "hoops", I'm assuming the OP means "transferring your physical media to networked storage".

And you'll have to do that no matter what solution you use. The only difference is in what "hoops" you have to jump through. Some only need the DVD to be ripped. Others want it in divx or h.264 format.

I started out ripping all my movies to h.264, so I have very few "hoops" to jump through, and my files play on almost all devices out there, including ATV.

It's a dang cheap way to get your stuff on your bigger screens, provided you're willing to jump through the necessary hoops.

Roku Box or WDTV, anyone? No hoops to jump through there...or, if you have an Xbox 360 or PS3, TVersity is a FANTASTIC solution.

TVersity + PS3 (or Xbox 360) = unlimited entertainment.

There is a post in the TVersity forums from back in April stating that TVersity would be coming to Linux within months. http://forums.tversity.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=13993/ IMO TVersity is a solid application. Unfortunately, at the moment, there is only a windows version released.

You can stream from your computer.

But will it stream x264 and/or xvid from the computer? That's the big question for me. The original AppleTV didn't, only Quicktime and MP4 IIRC.

Transcoding is your friend. Streaming transcoding is your close friend.

Disclaimer: I've never tried either program, I just did a quick google search. Or maybe TVersity or Orb will support the AppleTV.

I've no argument with you there, but to solve your practical problem, try Tversity

I know it isn't really the same, but those looking for one, mkv2vob (PS3 Video Converter) is a really nice tool to convert 720p mkv files to format that PS3 supports. Usually you don't even need to transcode, so it takes like 1 minute per video file.

avi/xvid files work directly.

To stream them from computer, TVersity is the best one.

Once you get those set up, it's actually quite nice and convenient. PS3 software and menu is actually really nice for media center, a lot better than 360's. Again not probably the same as XBMC, but it's pretty convenient anyway.

The 360 can play most movies natively! Depending on the encoding even HD movies, i've viewed 720P and 1080I blueray rips over my LAN. The 360-pro can do analog full HD with a component cable. You only need Windows Media Player 11 (or 10 maybe, not sure) and share your movie folder or harddisk to the 360. The 360 will ask for a media update for MPG4/XVID and download it from Xbox Live the first time you play a movie.

And if you insist on some hacking consider this: I added some mediaserver capability to my DD-WRT access point, my USB2 harddisk could be accessed from my 360 over LAN without having the PC running (and the PC used it as a NAS to store the movies). I will not recommend this because it was a lot of effort for a setup that tended to make the AP unstable after streaming or copying too much data. Go with WMP11 or any other media server on a PC instead, there also was some expirimental stuff out there that can provide some streaming video and youtube channels to the xbox.

Check out TVersity for a cool example of a fairly universal media server: http://tversity.com/

If you have a decent computer and an xbox/PS3/iPhone then use tversity - you get hulu, youtube, all your movies and more streamed to a number of different devices.

I don't even have cable...

--another Canadian

Hulu + Bittorrent + TVersity + XBox 360 MCE = Call me when a la carte cable service hits the streets.

Wait... when did Tversity start supporting Hulu?

I don't even have cable...

--another Canadian

Hulu + Bittorrent + TVersity + XBox 360 MCE = Call me when a la carte cable service hits the streets.

Perhaps TVersity will come to the rescue. I can already stream many web sources to my DirecTV HR20, Netflix could be the next best thing.

I use TVersity. It really works great and can play most videos I throw at it, and it will reencode the ones it can't play on the fly if you have the necessary hardware specs.

divx is easily possible. I'm sure the WinXP systems would be able to run Media Center/WMP10 well enough (bluetooth remote anyone?) and there are various other media centers you could use for the Ubuntu version.

You're probably better off using a 3rd party media server since WMC will only play Microsoft's supported formats (go figure) and won't transcode foreign formats. Personally, I'm using TVersity on my desktop server with my Xbox 360 as the client. TVersity will transcode on the fly to whichever format your device supports and dynamically adjust bitrate for your particular network; works beautifully.

When it comes to HD media, I doubt any of the current UMPCs are capable of outputting it. For one, you'll need an appropriate HD output port and VGA just doesn't cut it these days. You could get hi-res H.264 encodes which would play fine through a media server (with the appropriate codecs, of course) and assuming you have the network bandwidth to stream it.

So in other words, this works as a Windows Media Extender app, just with a different name because we all hate Windows. XBox and PS3 could care less what is actually serving the media. I use TVersity myself. The concept of reencoding your videos using FlashVideo or some other video format to allow viewing from a webbrowser (on the iPhone, Wii, etc), is also nothing new.

However, I have no clue who was first, TVersity, MythTV, Nero, or Microsoft, but they all do pretty much the same thing. I just had a bit better luck with TVersity than the others on streaming media that is not supported natively by my PS3 or Xbox

This same thing was asked roughly 9 months ago which got me thinking about my own solution. At first I was going to set up something like FreeNAS in a VM (easy backup, save states, etc.) but soon realized I needed more.

What I have now is a dedicated machine with four 500 gig HDDs in RAID 0+1 (I wanted 1+0 but I couldn't find the option and it's too late now).

In addition to a place on the network to store all my excessive files I can also use it for things like downloading media with Miro and sharing the media with TVersity, which allows me to stream media to my 360 etc.

In addition I added an RSYNC relationship (with deltacopy) between it and my primary PC for backing up and it is running JungleDisk (attached to Amazon's S3) for auto backup offsite.

It also is there if I want to rip and re-encode a DVD to DivX but still use my main machine for something else.

This is probably more than you were asking for but it is working pretty well for me.

If you wanted a low-power solution you could set all the above up with one of those mini-itx VIA boards (just buy a bulky enough PSU). The only devices I have are the five HDDs and a rarely used DVD-ROM. It doesn't actually take a lot of watts even with a normal board.

VIA mini-itx resource:
http://www.mini-itx.com/

DeltaCopy:
http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp

Miro:
http://www.getmiro.com/

TVersity:
http://tversity.com/

JungleDisk:
http://www.jungledisk.com/

Amazon S3:
http://aws.amazon.com/s3

The 360 won't play DivX 3 files, though, and there are plenty of those remaining out in the wild. I had to install TVersity to get my 360 to play all my AVIs, and it's still not as good as Xbox Media Center. XBMC on the Wii would be a killer.

You can already use the Wii as a frontend to a media server. Tversity can convert any video to FLV and stream it to the Wii. It has a nice flash interface, and you can also use it to display pictures and play mp3s located on your PC (via the Opera web browser). It's also free, which is good, as it has its limitations:

- Configuration options are a bit limited (no choice of framerate, for example).

- My Wii is connected by 801.11b, which limits quality of the videos (from what I can tell). I have the video resolution set to 240x180, which really sucks on a 46" tv, as Anything higher drops frames. I suspect that using a wired connection or the G protocol would allow for a higher throughput.

- I was watching a 90 minute video yesterday and the Opera browser gave me an "Out of memory" message about 85 minutes into the show. I'm not sure if higher resolutions or bitrates would fill the memory faster.

YMMV

Sort of a slashvertisement but it's related to the topic here. Microsoft, being the douches they are, give you a perfectly fine piece of hardware in the 360 but lock it down so you can't view anything but approved videos on it. They put in the really cool feature of streaming off of your PC but again, the PC needs XP, has to be running MediaPlayer 11, and using proprietary MS formats. Sucks, right? But no longer.

Using this neat little program, you can host videos on your PC and use it for the share connection rather than mediaplayer. Videos are transcoded to an acceptable MS format on the fly. The only drawback is that transcoded files have to be completed before search features will work -- no fast-forward or rewind. You can work around that by force-starting the encode cycle and then renaming the resulting cache file and playing it directly.

An installation guide.

The TVersity software download.

Granted, you'd probably find yourself having less of a headache if you just built a dedicated media center PC and sat it next to the Xbox. Myself, I just find the thought of having to buy duplicate hardware offensive.

Use GOTsent to remux 720p x264 .mkv tv-episodes to PS3 compatible .mp4 - no reencoding of video
Use Red Kawa PS3 Video 9 to remux anything that's not exactly 1280*720 - no reencoding of video

Use TVersity UPnP server to stream and reencode anything that's not h264 (i.e xvid) to a PS3 compatible mpeg2-stream

My PS3 is fast on it's way to being able to replace my Xbox+XBMC combos.

http://www.tversity.com/

Transcodes media, on demand, so your PS3 will play it.

I use it running inside a stripped down VM running Windows on a Sid host. Just mount your media from the local machine over Samba and point it at the share.

It also plays nicely with the Wii, 360, most smart phones, most of the DLNA home media devices, and can stream to any web browser that has Flash installed.

There is an awesome program called Tversity. It lets you stream media to your X box of your PC or Laptop. It also lets you stream formats other than WMV. I use my laptop with it and stream video to my 360 through Wifi. I absolutly love it, cant believe it hasent been mentioned before.

To turn the 360 into a useful media center use this program http://www.tversity.com/. It takes a little bit of effort to set up, i.e. must have codecs and such (install help - http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1002/playing_div x_and_xvid_content_on_xbox_360_an_easy_guide/index .html), . It runs on a networked PC and transcodes, on the fly, various video formats from your PC (including xvid) into wmv so the 360 will play them (assuming the 360 has a reasonably recent firmware update). It does what I thought the 360 should have done out of the box. After getting this working on my 360, I have since canceled my cable.

I don't know, I wish they would do what XBMC does and play any video format instead of just DRM WMV. If they would do that the 360 would be perfect. At the moment it feels crippled in that one regard.

While it's not a perfect solution you can use tools like http://www.tversity.com/home or http://runtime360.com/category/blog/transcoding/ to convert just about any media file into WMV in realtime to stream over a network.

Eric

fill up a portable HDD and attach it to my 360, or stream across the 'net. (Poor lil fella can't play DivX and it's what's hooked to my HDTV)

http://tversity.com/download/

I've had it running on my setup (xbox 360 wired in, Vista RTM on a laptop connected wirelessly) for a while now... works flawlessly for streaming audio, pictures, video... if you've got the codecs, TVersity will stream it.

It replaces the Media Player-based media sharing... not sure how it will affect your MCE setup.

In all of these devices the choice of media srever software is crucial. The DSM 320 while limited in native formats can actually play many more when paired with the right media server software (I like the one from http://www.tversity.com/) which does a real-time conversion to formats it supports. You can even play Internet streams directly on TV!