Amazon Video on Demand

I've recently fell in love with The Office, not the one I work at, but the one on NBC every Thursday night at 9:00 PM E. Since I'm just now tuning in I wanted to catch up with some previous episodes. Buying the DVDs is costly, Season 1 costs $22.99 on Amazon.com, and only six episodes aired that season. I found a way around this, however.

Pepsi Points was my answer. I've never been a big Pepsi fan, I would choose Coke if given the option, but I never really cared which carbonated beverage was washing down my lunch. That was not until I saw the Amazon.com logo plastered on the Pepsi bottle (The amazon logo has since been removed) which piqued my interested. I decided to start buying Pepsi products from the vending machine at work and see what I could actually get with Pepsi Points (I had been collecting Coke caps, but the promotions were either a) lame, b) too expensive (read: I couldn't drink that much coke in my life) or c) drawings which I knew I could never win). I soon discovered that with 5 Pepsi Points (1 point per cap) I could download most any MP3 on the Amazon.com MP3 store (totally DRM Free by the way), or with 12 points I could download an episode of a TV show. Since then I have been continuously collecting Pepsi Caps (even to the extent of picking them up when in public) so that I could earn more music and TV shows.

The experience of the Amazon Video on Demand store (previously the Amazon Unbox store) is pretty seamless. It's not the best ever but it is better than most for what it does. First you have to download the software from Amazon.com. Then you go to Amazon's Video on Demand store and select the video(s) you want to download, choose your method of payment and to which PC you want to download them to. You can also choose to watch the videos online without downloading the software if you wish. Once the videos download to your computer you can watch them whenever you want on your computer or use a Windows Media Extender like the Xbox360 to view the videos. The videos do carry a heavy DRM lock unlike the Amazon MP3 experience. Some of the frustrating things for me about the expirience is that you can't just transfer the videos to another computer; you have to download them again (there is an option to import videos into your library, but you have to be connected to the internet because of the DRM restrictions). Another problem is that I can't watch the videos on my iPod Touch. There is a mobile transfer option and I thought that I could watch them on my Samsung a727 phone which wouldn't be optimal, but it would be an alternative. However, the videos wouldn't play on my phone for some unknown reason. Amazon does offer help on the mobile option and provides a list of Microsoft certified Play for Sure devices if you happen to have one of those.

All in all this service is great as I can watch my videos in a good resolution on my TV through the Xbox360 media extender, but I would like to be able to watch these on my iPod. I don't see that happening in the near future, though, because I can see how that would be a conflicting interest for Apple as they already offer these videos in their store.

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.