This is off topic but probably the best thing I’ve found in a long time. I’ve been wanting to stream media off my computer to my xbox 360 since I got it last year but haven’t yet because I don’t have Windows Media Center. I’ve been just waiting I guess and haven’t put much work into finding an alternative method, till now.
I stumbled on this great article while searching Google for “play xvids on xbox 360″ and it totally opened my world to a whole new entertainment experience, one that I’ve totally embraced,, haha.. Can you tell I’m excited?
The great folks over at Tweaktown.com have put together a great article for playing divx and xvid files on your xbox 360 from your computer. It totally opened my eyes and introduced me to Tversity.
Tversity is the media streaming software you’ll be using to stream/play movies on your xbox 360. And man does it work great! I followed the article exactly as it said and I was up and streaming movies and mp3’s in a snap.
Of course there are system requirements that need to be met if you want everything to work smoothly and they are pretty basic. Basically the faster your machine the better. I’m running a p4 3ghz dell with 1gb of ram and it works really well. Here are the requirements you need to meet quoted from Tversity’s site:
# The minimum requirements will allow real-time transcoding of media files with bitrates up to 300-400 kbps. Higher bitrates will require faster machines.
# Media files that do not require transcoding, i.e. can be played by the media hub as is, will work well on systems meeting the minimum requirements, disregarding their bitrate, and in fact can even work on slower machines.
# Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz with support for Hyper Threading and with 512 MB of memory is recommended for real-time transcoding of standard definition video (e.g. WMV 720×480 1.5Mbps).
# Dual core or dual CPU systems with 1 Gbyte of memory are required for real-time transcoding of high definition video.
# Non real-time transcoding of any bitrate video can be done on any machine, with the speed of the machine determining the time it takes to complete the transcoding.
To be able to play/stream all your different media types you will need the codecs for each one.
Transcoding of some file formats require the installation of third party directshow filters that are compatible with TVersity. TVersity recommends:
* ffdshow - for MPEG2/4, H.264, Divx, Xvid, AAC, FLAC, Vorbis, FLV, and many more
* Haali Media Splitter - for better MP4 and H.264 support and for OGG/OGM and Matroska.
* Real Alternative - for Real audio and video.
* Quicktime Alternative - for MOV.
* MP4 Source/Splitter* - for better MOV support.
* FLV Splitter* - required for FLV playback.
* AC3 Filter - recommended for better AC3 support (in which case AC3 should be disbaled in ffdshow).
After you’ve installed Tversity and installed all the required codecs, hooked up your xbox to your router you’ll be ready to start watching and listening to all the media on your computer without having to fork over more money to Microsoft for Media Center.
You can share whole folders in Tversity or just single files and you can even stream media to your xbox that is online… Image Feeds, Video Feeds or Audio Feeds etc. So you can listen to your favorite podcasts while lounging on the couch, browse your Flickr photos and watch Youtube videos all while relaxing. You simply have to tell Tversity where to grab the feeds and your set.
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate Tversity for producing this software. As the article from Tweaktown says, once you set everything up it only takes about 10 - 15 seconds for a movie to start playing on your tv, and it plays back flawlessly. I first thought you couldn’t fast forward your movie because it didn’t work for me the first time, but when I tried it a second time it actually worked. I can fastforward now fine which is something I thought you couldn’t do with streaming media. Again it all depends on the machine you are running.
To sum it up go get Tversity if you want to play and stream DivX, Xvid, WMV, AVI, MOV, RSS Feeds, Podcasts, MP3 Files on your xbox 360. It’s freakin sweet to say the least.
Oh and Tversity is totally FREE!
Update: has Xbox360 stopped seeing your videos?
Microsoft has released today a new firmware update for the Xbox 360 and this broke compatibility with TVersity. Tversity as cool as they are quickly fixed this and made some cool improvements to the interface.
Go download the Tversity patch.
Instead of having to view all your files in one long flat list (quite annoying if you have hundreds of videos to scroll through) they now allow you to create folders and tag your videos for easier browsing.
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February 7th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
hey the tversity player is a little difficult. The above method can be used if you have windows XP home or professional. Instead if you have windows XP media center, then it is much simpler. Download a small application called transcode360 from this website http://www.runtime360.com/ I suppose you would have already downloaded the extender support from microsoft website. Just install this and you are ready to stream any video(i think) you have and especially DivX files. I have used this and it is wonderful
thanks
February 12th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
I checked out runtime360 and even he states he likes tversity and recommends it.. This is a quote from his site:
“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. “
May 25th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
Yeah tversity totally works out great. I can stream movies to my tv for the kids to watch during the day. I like the new updated version, it’s so much smoother.
September 29th, 2007 at 7:48 am
Yeah the new version is a lot better, and I think the xbox updates helped too. Like the menu scrolling when you’re going through your library is much faster. It aslo loops so when you’re at the end it goes back to the beginning, which it didn’t do before.
Does anyone have any experience with using xbox360’s wireless card? I’m wondering if movies will stream fine over a wireless connection compared to wired.
October 14th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Hi Jeff,
I am thinking of buying a xbox 360 elite, the one with the hdmi out put. I will connect it up to my plasma via hdmi and also to a sony Dolby digital amp. Now my question is with the tversity set up what drives the picture quailty, is it my pc or the xbox and secondly will i get DD5.1 sound. I currently use media player classic to play downloaded dvd rips and have my pc connected via a dvi to hdmi to my plasma and also to my amp and i get great pic and sound, but if i get the xbox it would be great if i could play them thought the xbox and still get the same results.
October 14th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Hi Mark,
The quality of your video and sound depends first on the original quality of your files. If they are HD then they will look great. Same with the sound. if you get great quality from downloaded dvd rips on your plasma it should be the same using tversity to stream it to your xbox, but it will depend on how fast your computer is and also your network because your xbox will be streaming the content off your computer.
You might see lag times when first playing your movies if your computer is slow.
I’m running a p3 3ghz box with 2gb of ram and it works great. Of course the fast the better.
October 17th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Hey,
Ok so here is where I am stuck.
On my 360, it sees all my music and pictures, however how do I access the videos??
I have them in the Library and they play in TVersity. But when I click video on the Media Dashboard, it shows the pre installed ones, and if I click media Center I get stuck at some thing that says stay here while the computer installs stuff.
How do I access videos?(avi’s)
October 18th, 2007 at 4:49 am
Hi Phil,
You need to go to your xbox360 dashboard and navigate to the media section. Then navigate to the video section and click on computer and you should see all your videos there. If you don’t then something is wrong.
If you see something that says “wait for the computer to install something” then you probably have to do just that. Make sure your computer has the latest version of tversity installed and you have installed all the codecs as well. Tversity cannot stream video if you don’t have all the required codecs installed. You should have installed the ones listed above.
If you do that and it still doesn’t work you should try emailing tversity or visiting their forums here: http://forums.tversity.com/ - they also have a pretty good faq section http://tversity.com/support/faq/
Hope that helps.
October 20th, 2007 at 1:57 am
Hey Thanks for your help
I had that working however now my PC wont connect to MediaServer, the icon will not turn blue. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling but no help. what can i do, I also allowed the exception for windows firewall
October 31st, 2007 at 3:46 am
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November 1st, 2007 at 3:08 pm
If there is the most useless, fiddly bit of software that will cause you the most hours of frustration because others have claimed it works, it has got to be tversity. I have tried this sucker countless times, done all the port settings, downloaded the latest version (in Sep 2007) disabled firewalls, disabled WMP 11, enabled firewalls, removed av software, configured av software, sold my dog, bought a frog, but absolutely NADA. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Nil.
……..and when I enable WMP 11, Xbox finds it in a second, and I can listen to my music and view damn photos. Oh flippin’ yay!
November 1st, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Oh, and did I say tversity sucks?
Cos it does.
November 11th, 2007 at 6:33 am
Wow Warren, I guess if it doesn’t work for you then it sucks, but I have found it to work perfectly without any problems. Saying that it doesn’t work doesn’t help anyone solve your problem without going through it step-by-step. Like, what system are you running, does tversity startup fine, what does your xbox say, how is your network set up, etc. I don’t offer support for tversity as they have a forum and support center of their own that maybe you should check out instead of ranting here. Best of luck.
November 11th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
hey im rayze
i have recently purchased a Xbox360 Elite im not sure what media capabilities it has, but i tried placing a dvd with some music videos on into the drive and it did not detect any of them, they were mostly AVI files, i am mainly looking for how to actualy get these videos “stored” onto my harddrive on my 360 not just streaming them to it.
any help would be great
thanks Rayze
November 11th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Hey Rayze,
I know for a fact xbox won’t play a cd or dvd with just avi files on it.. you’d have to convert those avi’s to dvd format and then burn that image onto a dvd for that to play. I also believe to get any movies or data on your xbox hard drive you need to download media directly from microsoft’s marketplace via xbox live. I’ve never done that.
I found it was easier to just stream my content off my computer to my xbox using tversity.
You might want to search for a xbox forum and ask there. You might need to get your xbox modded.
June 17th, 2008 at 5:30 am
In case anyone is reading this, MS released a system update (’Fall 07 update’) last year which enables the Xbox 360 to play .avi divx files very well. At least, it works for about 90% of my downloaded titles and all of my self-ripped files. I don’t think it can handle some of the non-standard special quality features (?Qpel, etc)…
I agree that TVersity is a great piece of free software. I use it to stream the above divxs to my Xbox wirelessly.
A quick hint, though: the new version is aware of the latest Xbox update, though… so unless you apply the update (freely available from Microsoft), you won’t have any joy playing .avi files because TVersity won’t transcode them to WMV on the fly for you anymore (it assumes they’ll just play - which they will once you apply the update).
I hope this saves someone the confusion I had trying to get this set up. It’s worth it once you get it working, though!
July 14th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
how about MKV files does it can stream to play on Xbox360?
Let me here it.