how 2 IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE, ONE STEP AT A TIME
66 MAXIMUMPC | MAR 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
4 Add Media to TVersity
5 Stream to Your Xbox
6 Improve Your Visual Quality
7 Troubleshoot
This is the easy part. Open the TVersity client
on the host media-streaming PC, click the
big, green plus sign in the upper-left corner,
and then add the folders that contain your
media. It’s really important to tell TVersity
what types of content to search for in each
folder. Your music directory, for example,
likely contains tons of album art that willall be funneled to TVersity’s photo section
unless you uncheck the Photo box.
After you’ve added your media, it will
take TVersity a while to search all your fold-
ers and add everything to its library. Take a
10-minute break to walk the dog or make a
snack—it’s best not to use TVersity while it’s
performing a scan.The fi rst thing you should do is test video
playback on your 360 using its default set-
tings. Fire up your Xbox and go to the Media
blade. Select the Videos option, then press X
to select your source. Now select the option
labeled “TVersity on <your PC’s name>:1.”
If you don’t see that option, you need to
open a port on your fi rewall, or possibly dis-
able Windows Media Connect on your serverPC. Windows Media Connect, the default
streaming utility for Xbox, serves a function
similar to TVersity’s, which can cause confl icts.
To disable Connect, open up Windows Media
Player on your PC and press Alt to open the
menus. Go to Tools, then Options, and click
the Library tab. Click Confi gure Sharing and
then uncheck Share My Media. You may have
to restart your PC to see a change.Once your Xbox is connected to your
PC, you can go to the Media/Videos sec-
tion and browse to a video. Assuming
that works, move on to the next step. If it
doesn’t, you probably need to go back and
take another look at the installed codecs.
If there’s nothing obviously wrong on the
codec front, skip ahead to Step 7 for trou-
bleshooting instructions.If you’re having trouble getting stream-
ing to work, there are three likely culprits:
codec issues, bandwidth problems, or
PC-performance problems. If Codec Sniper
and Add/Remove programs didn’t fi x the fi rst
issue, back up your rig and reinstall Windows.
Reinstalling Windows sucks, but trouble-shooting codec problems is even worse.
Unfortunately for Xbox users with crappy
networks, there isn’t an easy way to copy an
already converted movie to your hard drive.
Microsoft simply doesn’t allow this. On the
other hand, if your CPU isn’t up to the task
of encoding in real time, you can help that byincreasing the hard drive space available to
cache already-converted movies. To do that,
go to Settings in TVersity and increase the
amount of disk space to give more space to
converted fi les. Then start viewing a movie. It
may fail at fi rst, but if you give it time to build
up a buffer, the video should play.Two factors will determine the visual quality
of your streamed media: the speed of your
PC and the quality of the network connection
between your PC and the Xbox. Transcoding
video is tough CPU work and streaming media
is network intensive. TVersity’s default settings
work reasonably well on an 802.11g network,
but the resulting video looks terrible. You’ll
be hard-pressed to stream even DVD-quality
video across wireless—at least until there’s an
802.11n-based solution for streaming video.
To make quality adjustments, open the
TVersity client and click the Settings tab. Then
go to the Transcoder page. We recommend
that you adjust these options one at a time,
then save your settings, restart the service
(Advanced menu, Restart Sharing), and test
playback to ensure that one change doesn’t
bork your setup.
First, adjust the maximum video reso-
lution so TVersity doesn’t automatically
down-convert your ripped DVDs to a lowerresolution. If you’re on a wired network, we
recommend using the native resolution of your
set. Typical resolutions are 1280x720 (720p)
and 1920x1080 (1080p). If you’re streaming to
a standard-def set, leave TVersity at its default
setting. By using the native resolution of your
TV set, you’ll get the best possible image
quality, without forcing TVersity to resize your
video on the fl y. If you experience network
performance problems, it’s a good idea to
adjust this setting to 640x480 or lower.
Now, adjust the other settings. If you’re
on a wireless network or have a slow CPU,
your performance will suffer if you enable
these settings. First, make sure the box
labeled “Use DirectShow for Windows Media
Encoding” is checked and the codec is set
to Windows Media Video 9. This will improve
performance and the quality of the video the
system outputs. Next, set Optimization to
Quality; set your Connection Speed to Wired
(100Mbps), with the quality set to Excellent;and change the Compression setting to
Minimum. Remember, your changes won’t
take effect until you click Save at the bot-
tom of the page and then restart the TVersity
service by going to the Advanced menu and
clicking Restart Sharing.
Now go back to the Xbox Media/Videos
section and enjoy the results!When adding media to TVersity’s library,
be sure to indicate at the bottom of the
screen what type of content you want
streamed from the folder.TVersity’s default settings are fine for
wireless connections, but a wired connec-
tion and increased visual-quality settings
offer the most satisfying results.