Well I’m two weeks in with my XBOX360 and I still cannot get it to stream videos from my Vista PC upstairs. Despite my attempts to use Tversity, I seem to be no closer to getting the videos streaming.
Damn you to hell Microsoft. If playing HALO3 wasn’t so much fun….
Your doing something wrong then. I have been able to stream both from my G5 iMac and from my intel iMac using Windows under Bootcamp and was able to do both.
Have you installed the media extender?
I’m running Vista Business edition Tony. My understanding was I don’t need to? If that’s wrong, where do I download it?
Do you have media centre with the business edition?
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/pcsetup/alldownloads.htm
No mate, Business edition doesn’t come with it, believe it or not. But my understanding what that by running Tversity I don’t need Media Center.
Media Center is the best. Doon’t let anyone at MS know but slightly forgive them the lack of Ultimate Extras for the fact that Ultimate has MC. I was just watching the first few minutes of Hereos on it. The remote control is cool. Pausing live TV.It having a record buffer.
Plus subscribing to IceTv (mollyfud if anyone joins) getting a real Guide and remote recording, fantastic!
Molly
Cam, to be fair its really not the 360’s fault. If anything its probably Vista and/or TVersity’s fault. But anyway, have you checked all your port forwarding and firewall settings. There’s a bit of a FAQ here http://tversity.com/support/faq/#troubleshooting-faq
I’ve been using TVersity with XP Pro (non Media Centre version) for a while and it’s been working a treat. Not really the same setup as you, but it should be similar. However if TVersity isn’t doing it for you, maybe try out Orb http://www.orb.com/ I used Orb for about 6 months and it basically does what TVersity does, but I eventually abandoned it due to stability issues. The issues may well have just been due to my setup, I don’t know. I figure you might want to give it a shot anyway.
Scott, I disagree. Why doesn’t the 360 just read the divx and xvids on my Vista PC the same way they read the mp3s??
Yeah, fair point. I’ll give you that one. I’d imagine Microsoft will tell you that the reason is that they don’t control those formats so can’t guarantee a good user experience and would rather not provide anything. The reality probably has more to do with trying to lock people into the wmv format. There has been speculation of an Xbox update that will do just what you want, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Back to the problem at hand, do you get videos appearing in the TVersity interface on your PC? In other words, has TVersity actually added your videos to its library?
Is the issue that there are no videos in the list on the Xbox or that they don’t stream play when you try to play them?
Is your Xbox hooked up to the intarweb and have you run the last Xbox few updates when they’ve appeared?
Scott, MSFT don’t control mp3 either, but my 360 manages to find my iTunes library and play them all okay.
Yeah I can see and play the videos through Tversity on the PC and the 360 is connected to both the PC (it will stream photos and music through Tversity) and the interwebs (XBOX live works fine).
But I havent had any updates that I can recall. You think I should try to run them?
Yeah, I agree. I’m not defending MS, just throwing up the standard arguments used.
I tend to run the XBox 360 updates when they come through. I don’t tend to use Xbox Live much other than to sign in on start up but I get the feeling that unless you’ve run the latest updates they won’t let you sign on, so therefore you’re Xbox is probably full up to date.
If you are seeing a list of available video on the Xbox but it just won’t stream then its probably a port/firewall issue, although there are a few other TVersity specific transcoding settings that could also be the problem. I’m not at home at the moment, so I don’t have my setup in front of me but I’ll try to remember to look a few things up when I get home.
The whole thing is a right PITA to setup and get working, its certainly not a regular consumer grade setup. It took me a couple of hours to get setup and get something streaming the first time around. There’s no way my parents or non-tech type people could be expected to do it. One day all this type of stuff will be as simple as plugging things in and they automagically work , but for now we have to suffer through a million combinations of possible settings.
Well it turns out that after all my mucking about with port forwarding in the past (while using Orb), absolutely none of it was required to get TVersity to work with my 360.
My issues were firewall related. If you are running Windows Firewall then you need to make sure that the Streaming Media activity is enabled but Media Center Extender activity is disabled. Obviously I have allowed both the TVersity.exe and the MediaServer.exe programs through the firewall. Under Ports & Protocols I have “Xbox 360 & Network Media Players†enabled but “Xbox 360 & Media Center Extenders†disabled. Sorry have no idea if these things have the same names in the Vista Firewall but there is a list of specific ports here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910635 Assuming you are running a software firewall of some sort I wouldn’t recommend switching it off permanently but you could switch it off temporarily to see if it’s causing issues or not. Also make sure Media Sharing is switched Off in Media Player.
If none of that is the issue, then perhaps its TVersity settings. I thought that it pretty much worked straight out of the box, but perhaps I tweaked some settings I really can’t remember. I know I played with the Windows Media Encoder settings but ended up setting them back to Windows Media Video 8 because I had issues using anything else. I’m also using DirectShow, I can’t recall if that’s the default or not. Other than that I don’t recall changing anything else other than my connection speed quality. I set it to wired, because my Xbox is wired and I don’t much care about streaming to wireless devices.
If you’re still having no luck you could try stopping TVersity (to take it right out of the equation) getting hold of a wmv file from somewhere, adding it to your media player library and enabling Media Sharing from within Media Player. If you can get your 360 to play the wmv file that way then there’s a good chance your network is setup properly and it’s a TVersity issue, if not then you’ll need to keep playing with network settings I guess.
Cam, are you happier since the recent(ish) XBox update? You should be able to watch divx & xvid avi’s straight from your PC just using the built in Microsoft Media Connect stuff. Which is nice.
Scott, actually I havent been able to get that to work. I can’t seem to get my PC and XBOX to connect at all since the update.