TVersity on-the-fly movie transcoding (Update)
Published by runtime 360 November 25th, 2006 in TranscodingJust weeks after the Fall Update introduced UPNP video client functionality to the Xbox 360, the clever chaps at TVersity are the first to offer a UPNP server featuring a realtime transcoding solution targeting the Xbox 360 in early beta form.
In short this means that users of Windows XP (and other Windows platforms) can now automatically stream their video library to the Xbox 360, to some extent irrespective of the file format and encoding used. E.g. DivX, XViD, etc.
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There is a limitation with regards to seeking while transcoding and the transcoding thread priority is a bit too high, but beyond that I found TVersity very easy to get up and running. I haven’t yet had the chance to see how it handles AC3. In any case, no doubt the solution will improve over time, but at this early stage its looking very promising indeed! |
I thoroughly recommend you check out TVersity as it is in my opinion a much better solution than Transcode 360 for several reasons. For starters T360 requires a Media Center PC, but perhaps more importantly, from an implementation perspective T360 has a lot of dependencies that make installation more complex than I’d like.
The beauty of TVersity as a solution is that its (a) UPNP standards based (b) supports both Windows XP and Windows 2000 (c) designed to work with many more devices than just the Xbox 360.
More information after the jump.
You’ll probably want to edit the Settings to increase the resolution of the transcoded video to compensate for the poor quality scaling algorithm the Xbox 360’s UPNP client applies. I find that 640×480 works pretty well but if you have the horsepower its almost certainly better if you can match the 360’s native resolution. The 360’s client currently only supports WMV video, so inherently more CPU resources are needed.
Update: Having played around with TVersity some more I have to qualify my recommendation since theres an additional issue worth considering. Previously I mentioned how poorly the Xbox 360 UPNP video client is at upscaling, a bigger issue is the client’s terrible user-interface. All video files and folders are flattened out into a single list, which can be very inconvenient when you have to scroll through 100’s of files to find the one you want; both issues are outside of TVersity’s control, so let’s hope Microsoft gets on the case and addresses them in their next update.
And Microsoft while you’re at it, how about some MPEG 2 love? Forcing UPNP servers to transcode to WMV just isn’t right!
Great find, I saw this on xbox-scene a few days ago and was going to give it a try. Maybe thats how you heard about it too? Glad to see you support it though.
Well, TVersity is nice, but for those of us running 1Ghz or less CPU, it really slows the cpu down. I guess i’ll be stuck w/ encoding my Divx to WMV to play on the 360. Tho its faster to just make a VCD.
It’s a start.
The onus is still on Microsoft to make to expand the streaming functionality IMO, rather than making us rely on transcoding and decent PCs, least of all Windows. I can maybe understand their reluctance to implement DivX and XviD, but how about MPEG-2 so that I can stream DVB recordings? Or basic MPEG-4? AVC? DV? Encoding to any of those is less of a pain than WMV, especially since I’m on a Mac.