Here I go again. Praising the abilities of this technological wonder I now own…
See that image above? Click on it for bigness. It’s an image of Windows XP running inside OS X, and acting as a TVersity transcoding media server to my Xbox 360 sitting downstairs. I set this up on the offchance that it would work, fully expecting it to fail. I suppose I should know better by now – there’s nothing this Mac has failed on yet! Basically, TVersity is a uPnP media server that transcodes content to the format required by the 360 on the fly. I’m yet to look for a suitable mac alternative, and until then, I’m sticking with this. After all, I can just fire it up and away it goes. The only caveat in the whole shebang is the fact i have to dedicate both CPU cores on the Mac to this, slowing the OS X side down a fair bit. Thing is, I dont really mind this, as I’m very unlikely to be watching something downstairs whilst still trying to use my Mac upstairs (unless I go about some twisted VNC shenanegans).
This thing continuously amazes me!
Stay tuned for my rundown (now its more or less finished) of how I got all my home studio stuff talking happily.
Can you give a step by step on what you did to get this whole thing going. I would love that. Thanks!
There’s not too much to it, except to install the Server as per the instructions on the website at http://www.tversity.com. You use the same codecs etc as for a standard Windows PC. There’s good guides on that site about getting it up an running.
Is there anything in particular you’d like included if I did a guide?
Like screenshots of your TVersity settings, which settings works best for your situation, stuff like that. How about the streaming through your shared folder on your mac? Does it work fast? I want to stream at 1080 so I need a fast solution. I have a Mac Pro with 3 GB of RAM. Looking on the TVersity site I couldn’t find much about the whole Fusion, XP, TVersity thing. You are the man to come to about this so I just wanted to know what your best results were. Thanks.
You could try giving the OSX native app Rivet http://cynicalpeak.com/rivet/ or Connect360 http://www.nullriver.com/products/connect360. Neither has the features of TVersity and both cost but they both get the job done and integrate well with OSX. I found Rivet to have more features but it constantly hogged resources, perhaps it was a bit overzealous on updating the media library. Connect360 I found to be very stable but offers only a bare minimum of features and can only handle one folder each for movies, pictures and video. Both integrate iTunes playlists which is a very nice advantage over TVersity.
Cheers for the advice, but I’ve been there, done that already
I’ve bought and have been using Connect360 for quite a while, though recently, I’ve actually gone over to using a media server that I built up from old PC bits. I found the 360 too fussy about what it wanted to accept (especially with HD content). I find that the media server is fantastic, and plays anything I throw at it…!
Cheers for the advice anyway
You should try Nullriver Medialink. I love it, the only thing Im waiting for is PS3 to support MKV. As of now I am just converting them in VMware fusion then stream them.