JamesX

Today I’ve been playing with TVersity. To be honest, I think I’ve been hiding under a rock because I’m usually all over these things the second they are out. Anyway, after reading Chris Davies’ post about it, I had to give it a try. I have to say, I’m blown away by how good it is. It’s the only thing I’ve seen that is able to offer seamless, real-time transcoding of almost every format to WMV. Why is this important? Well if you have an Xbox 360, then you’ll know that playing DivX (and any other format that’s not Microsofty) is a pain, if not impossible!

That said, it wasn’t all smooth sailing into the lush waters of transcoding harbour. Naturally, before it’ll convert anything, you need to have the codecs for it to work with. I was doing this on my Vista machine (because I like punishment) and that, it seems, has it’s own set of issues to deal with. Getting TVersity installed took all of 15 seconds, and ffdshow gave me 90% of the codecs I needed. The problem was, I have all the content stored either on my NAS server or the Media Centre PC in the living room. After hours of mucking around, it turns out that unless you have the TVersity Windows service set to login with a username and password, and also have that same username and password available on every other network device you want to stream media from, it just wont work. The problem was so poorly documented that I spent most of the afternoon stumbling my own way through and wham, there it was on my Xbox. Only problem now was that it was transcoding upside down!

Luckily, this problem was known and it had an easy fix - update to the nightly build of ffdshow. I have no idea why the nightly build works and the release doesn’t, and frankly, I don’t really care. Now I can watch my downloaded TV episodes on any device in the house, including my Xbox, removing the need for having my old laptop connected to my TV! You really should check it out!