TVersity is great.

[toastman]

For your XBox 360.

There it is now a gaming post.

But really. The fall update was supposed to bring DivX/Xvid codecs to the 360 and also allow Windows XP Pro to stream (or it may just be a function of WMP11 (not too clear on the details, the important bit is the codecs. Never mind the XP stuff if it is wrong)). However, after downloading WMP11 and setting everything up, I had a problem.

WMP11 was alright setting up the library and sharing it out. The 360 could see it and access it. But when it came time to list files in a directory, it would take forever. Then Media Sharing would crash on the host PC. Then the 360 would list the files, although none of them would play. After mucking about for a bit, I decided to check out TVersity (someone at work had mentioned it). It's more of a general media streaming server, but it has a specific mode for UPnP devices (I think that's how they put it). Or more specifically, the 360 and PS3.

Works like a champ. There's really nothing to set up. Just install the software, point it to the proper directories (it will automatically crawl sub-directories) and that's it. On your 360, go to the Media blade, select videos, press X to select a source, and it should appear as "TVersity on <hostname>" (where <hostname> is the name of the computer the server is on). Once you select it, you should see the TVersity hierarchy (which can include photos and music as well).

Also, it has web and flash interfaces so you can watch video on your Wii with the Internet Channel as well. The video quality is noticeably less with the flash interface. And if you want to poke holes in your firewall, you can expose TVersity to the internet at large, so you can watch your videos from anywhere you have an internet connection.

All in all, it's a solid piece of work and allows me to run less wires and consolidate functions into less machines.

[Lunchbox]

For some reason whenever I run TVersity it slowly begins to take up more and more ram, eventually more than a 1 and a half Gigabytes all by itself, which in turn begins to slow my PC down. I couldn't figure out why, I had to uninstall it. It worked well when I was streaming though, very easy to use.