Tversity
Posted on 12:52 pm by Paul ColliganI installed Tversity last week and wanted to give it the old college try before writing a review.
If the thing was half as good as it claims to be, my Media Center PC purchase might have been premature. The premise of the software (freeware by the way) is that it transcodes video content on the fly and can push to a number of other devices (such as an Xbox 360). No need for Media Center and no need for a WMV world only.
In short, this is, if it works, everything I need.
The Good: It does “work” a good chunk of the time. I didn’t need a fancy computer to run it on. It is free.
The Bad: Installation is hard for the non-Geeky. I can’t imagine anyone who doesn’t eat/sleep/drink this stuff being able to install it. It doesn’t work with all files. You can’t fast forward through video. It crashes on a semi-regular basis.
Let me explain those last two issues. I enjoy the show Cranky Geeks. Sometimes I watch on my Mac, sometimes my iPod and occasionally I get a few minutes on the couch. Yes, they’ve got a WMV version, but instead of running multiple downloads (of the same show), wouldn’t it be nice if …
It’s a 30 minute show and I have attempted to watch the last 3 through my Xbox via Tversity.
Every time, the thing crashed (twice, it crashed the PC that was streaming it and I had to reboot) more than 15 minutes into it. I couldn’t reboot and fast forward to the section I lost it at. Basically, it was an exercise in frustration.
So, at this point, I declare Tversity a great idea - just not ready for prime time.
Technorati Tags: tversity, mp4, cranky geeks, wmv, xbox, xbox 360
5 Comments »
January 19, 2007
Ronen Mizrahi said:
Thank you for taking the time to try it.
One of the major drawbacks of TVersity is that it relies on the stability of your directshow installation and set of codecs you have. Directshow, for those who do not know is the extensible mechanims offered by Windows to support a wide range of multimedia formats.
Unfortunately many users have a “bad” / unstable / full of conflicts system and this leads to crashes. Yes we know people will consider this an instability of TVersity, just like the case at hand, and we know we need to find a way around this. We are working on it.
As a side note, I am sure you are familiar with the little message Windows Media Player opens before playing a non Microsoft format, telling you that it will try but it could crash and indeed in many cases it does. The same thing happens to TVersity.
In the meantime I can assure you that if you take the time to fix those issues you will end up with a rock solid media server, that has been out there for 18 months now and is used by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.
January 19, 2007
Paul Colligan said:
Ronen,
Thanks for your comments.
So, how do I fix those issues? Is there some guide online I can follow?
Paul
January 19, 2007
Ronen Mizrahi said:
I suggest going through our quickstart guide (it was recently updated to include guidance for 360 users). It is available at:
http://tversity.com/support/quickstart/
In a nutshell you need to make sure you have the latest stable version of the codecs we suggest on our download page.
In some rare cases, you need to cleanup old codecs from your system and uninstall codec packs and other video related software that creates conflicts and then reinstall the codecs we suggest on our download page.
January 20, 2007
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[…] We tried the open-source Tversity product at the Year of Living Digitally. Results weren’t stellar but someone from the project contacted us to explain how we could get better performance. […]
January 26, 2007
Darwin Weyh said:
I use tversity with the mp4 feeds of crankygeeks and geekbriefs and the divx feed from DLTV with my dlink DSM-320 over my wireless g.
I also stream ripped DVD videos and mp3’s to my stero.
I seldom have a problem with it. I downloaded and installed all the free codecs listed on the tversity site and they seem to all work well.
I was using twonky but got better codec support from tversity.