Monday, June 2, 2008

TVersity

I downloaded TVersity saturday. I saw it featured in a Tekzilla episode. TVersity is a media server that can play your videos, music, and stream pictures. It also serves up your media to a variety of devices including the iPhone/iTouch, Xbox 360, PS3, other Computers, and the internet. Not only will it stream media from your PC, but it will stream media off the web. If you're not familiar with Revision3 it is a website that hosts shows that would be equivilent to a small broadcast television station. All the shows on Revision3 have feeds that will update you when new shows are out, like podcasts. You can subscribe to these feeds in TVersity and stream the media off the internet if you don't feel like waiting to download the whole High Definition video to your hardrive.
Right off the bat I thought it was going to be super easy to stream media to my Xbox 360. Not so, I did have to spend some time setting up my Xbox to notice the TVersity server as a media server. I googled my problem and found an answer from After Dawn Guides. After reading the entire After Dawn guide and setting up my Xbox 360 wireless connection again. I messed with my router to make sure all the ports were open, they were. After banging my head against the wall for about an hour I decided to turn off Windows Firewall. DING!!! Why didn't I think of that first. Windows Firewall is always the answer. After a few minutes the TVersity server was streaming media straight to my Xbox. You do have to mess with the settings to get the video to look better, the default resolution makes the videos kind of grainy. I double the resolution and the picture looked acceptable. I still need to play with the settings for a while, but I was tired of messing with it after all that.
TVersity does so much more than what I've discussed here. It can stream images from a flickr feed or your computer, and it can stream to a Wii or over the internet. If you get TVersity up and running in any way let me know in the comments and maybe add some screens shots or pictures of what you've done with it.

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