Devias
Shared on Sun, 12/16/2007 - 12:15Now that the Fall Update lets you play Divx and Xvid files on your 360's Media Blade, I decided to take several uPnP servers out for a spin so I could connect my computer to my 360 via my wireless network.
TVersity was the first one I tried out. Great product, and it's free. It also comes with the option to do on-the-fly transcoding of unsupported video formats. Basicaly, if you have say a Quicktime movie (unsupported on the X360), it'll convert it to something that you can play on the X360 in real time. This of course takes up some CPU power on your host machine, and now that Divx is supported natively, it's something I didn't use much.
Tversity also had a handy preview window of how your folders and music was organized. That ended up becoming part of the problem. The product organized your music into several folders, which made sense (Artist, Year, Album, etc). However, you couldn't organize it your own way. You have to stick with Tversity's organizational schema, which can get tedious when you have to go to Photos/All Photos/Slideshow/Foldername/2007/Folder. Finally, Tversity has trouble with media library updates. Often I had to run back into the host computer and hit "refresh all" for it to find music that I just added to it. You could schedule it to auto-rescan if you left your computer on all day, but on-the-fly updating would have been nice.
I am now using TwonkyMediaserver, which is free for 30 days and then $20 or so afterwards. It has a web-based configuration utility, so I can add files to the library from anywhere on my wireless LAN. You can configure your own folder settings unlike Tversity. It also comes with a ton of internet radio stations that stream perfectly (as "Saved Playlists") from the X360 music blade. What I am not sure is if Twonky can stream Youtube or podcasts, like Tversity does. It updates the library automatically and seems "faster" than Tversity, probably because the default installation is a little more bare bones that Tversity, without all the built in folder settings and URLs.
TVersity was the first one I tried out. Great product, and it's free. It also comes with the option to do on-the-fly transcoding of unsupported video formats. Basicaly, if you have say a Quicktime movie (unsupported on the X360), it'll convert it to something that you can play on the X360 in real time. This of course takes up some CPU power on your host machine, and now that Divx is supported natively, it's something I didn't use much.
Tversity also had a handy preview window of how your folders and music was organized. That ended up becoming part of the problem. The product organized your music into several folders, which made sense (Artist, Year, Album, etc). However, you couldn't organize it your own way. You have to stick with Tversity's organizational schema, which can get tedious when you have to go to Photos/All Photos/Slideshow/Foldername/2007/Folder. Finally, Tversity has trouble with media library updates. Often I had to run back into the host computer and hit "refresh all" for it to find music that I just added to it. You could schedule it to auto-rescan if you left your computer on all day, but on-the-fly updating would have been nice.
I am now using TwonkyMediaserver, which is free for 30 days and then $20 or so afterwards. It has a web-based configuration utility, so I can add files to the library from anywhere on my wireless LAN. You can configure your own folder settings unlike Tversity. It also comes with a ton of internet radio stations that stream perfectly (as "Saved Playlists") from the X360 music blade. What I am not sure is if Twonky can stream Youtube or podcasts, like Tversity does. It updates the library automatically and seems "faster" than Tversity, probably because the default installation is a little more bare bones that Tversity, without all the built in folder settings and URLs.
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