Media comes in all shapes and sizes nowadays. Everyone knows that… The problem we have,though, is methods to consume those formats. I am one of those that likes to have 1 place to go to for all of my media stuff. If I have avi’s, dvd’s, Internet videos feeds, etc, etc., I would prefer to be able to have them all accessible in 1 place. To compound the issue, I also like to be able to play this centralized video repository anywhere I want.
Anyway, so I start looking for my solution. The first obvious choice is Windows Media Center. It is okay… It really does not support all the file formats I want. It does not do Internet video feeds. Finally, it is not very friendly w/ other playback devices, other than a TV. You can "make" it do more, but IMHO it is really more trouble than its worth, especially since any patching on M$’s side will break your fixes.
After looking around for a while, I ran across TVersity. This little app is hardcore. Basically, they promise that they can hook up to almost any video format that you can configure your computer to play and… it will play back on almost any device. In order to do this, the have many differnt ways to connect to the server including uPNP, Flash, HTTP, etc. Very nice! Essentially, this means that I can not only consume any media into my library, but I can also play it back on my PS3, XBOX, XBOX 360, Wii, TV, other computers, PSP, Nintendo DS (I think), computer at work, hacker’s computer in China, etc., etc., etc… Awesome. The basic gist is that if your computer can play it, Tversity can stream it. I takes the playback on the computer and re-encodes the video feed into a the format that is applicable to the requesting device. In fact, it has a large list and is rather "smart" when it comes to picking the right format for the right device.
Although I would never want to watch Dragonball Z on my PSP, knowing that I can is pretty freaking cool!
After downloading, installing, adding the media, and running the server, I was ready to start viewing… Error: Unsupported format… Error: Cannot connect… Error: Generic Message.. It seems that although Tversity may play on any system you will most likely have real issues getting to play on ANY system. lol…
The problem w/ installing Tversity is that it depends upon many things. 1st off, you have to make sure you have all the right codecs. 2ndly, you have a lot of permission issues you have to work through. Finally, you need to do some tweaking, depending upon what you are serving from.
This problem is confounded b/c there are so many "fixes" out there for every issue, of which only 1/2 works… I spent DAYS trolling forums, trying to get everything right. As it turns out, most of it is pretty simple, but much of the advice tends to throw you down some deep rabbit holes. After looking into it, here is the setting that finally worked for me.
- Install the latest and greatest FFDSHOW. Many ppl will tell you to get the beta version or the version 2 years old, etc etc etc. That only wasted my time…
- Tversity’s service account MUST run as administrator. I don’t care what anyone else says. If this is not running as Admin, it will not work. Also, you will get very generic errors on your system like "Unsupported format". It will not throw an error on the system.
- If you are grabbing a Linux share in your video list, you must make sure the tversity service account is a user on that Linux box. This will allow the PS3 to read the share. The 360, to date, still does not play nice.
- Restart the service every time you make a change of codecs. You must choose restart service in the menu option or in the Services console to do so. Closing and reopening the app does not touch the service.
- If you want subtitle support (for avi), they must be in a separate directory and of the .srt format. (If you encoded them directly on the video, ignore this). In order to allow the system to find them, go into the settings for FFDSHOW and point to the subtitle directory. The subtitles must be named exactly like the movie file (excluding the extension).
- When the library is refreshing, do not try to access the videos b/c it will throw random generic error. In fact, when you get the "Unsupported format" error, make sure the library is not being refreshed. This is a total pain when you are troubleshooting.
- Also, if you have spent a long time on trying to fix it. Be sure to clean up after yourself. If worse comes to worse, uninstall the servers and all applicable codecs. Many people have issues that they fix, but don’t work b/c they tried so many fixes.
Anyway, TVersity is pretty awesome. Once you get it up and running it is well worth the time it took to set up. Check it out!
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