Media Streaming around the home: TVersity

If like me, you have bought an Xbox 360 and alot of tv shows and films on a computer, you might want to consider streaming them around your home. Now, the 360 has many options to do this, but there are problems with some of them.

You can connect through the Media Center OS or Media Player. Obviously, you would need to pay out money for the Windows Media Center or the Premium versions of the V word (that rhymes with Mister).

Media Player is free for all versions of Windows and if you upgrade to version 10, you can use the Media Connect functionality to do so. This is not the greatest solution as you can come across problems with the encoding of the videos (DivX, Xvid etc aren’t natively supported). You can use TransCoder but it’s clunky design means you have to select Advanced on the video you want, then scroll down to Transcoder then wait till it has streamed enough for the video to start.

So after a couple of days searching on many websites, I stumbled across TVersity. Install it on your master computer (that with all the media on), then configure a couple of firewall settings and it is complete! It allows you to use the Xbox menu system to view the folders that you have added to the library of the TVersity program.It also allows you to stream to Wii, iPhone, PS3 and any web browser enabled PC. It can play DivX files and no need faffing around with the menus.

5 Stars!

Easy like a Sunday Morning.

I shall be testing out TwonkyMedia in the short future as I would like to setup Linux on my box, as TVersity isn’t available for Linux I feel this is the next best choice.

Spotify

Yet again, I am late to hop onboard the bandwagon. However, if you haven’t had a chance to use the Spotify program, you are missing out. Spotify is a music streaming application that allows you to search and listen to music from your favourite artists using it’s (somewhat) iTunes influenced interface. The two features I enjoy most are the “similar artists” and the display of the compliations the selected artist’s songs appear on.

Spotify

It is free but mentions that there are adverts in between songs, these are not as frequent as I expected. I have been listening for about an hour and heard a short 20 second placement encouraging me to search for a specific band. I have no idea how they managed to acquire the licences for this service but good on them!

If you need an invitation, just add a comment at the bottom of this article with your email address and I will send you one.