Please understand this message is being written from the POV of someone who has owned a 360 since launch and just bought a PS3.

Now, I use a laptop hooked up to a MyBook as my media server and all it really has to do is serve up a file when one of my media devices (PC, 360, PS3) asks for it.

The problem here is that the 360 is really damn picky about what servers it will accept. All of my video (ok, 99%) is encoded in H.264. For whatever bizarre reason, WMP11 doesn't do H.264 at all, doesn't recognize it, won't add it to the library, etc. Zune recognizes H.264 but won't share with anything other than Zunes or 360's.

Getting to the point ... Is there one media server that I can use for both 360 and PS3 to stream H.264 video?

Thanks in advance

I personally use TVersity off my vista machine and stream all my media from my NAS to my PS3 with no problems. I only have a few things encoded in H.264 and I am 99% positive I haven't had any problems with them streaming to my PS3. The only annoying part of the application was setting up the initial firewall configuration in Vista to allow my PS3 to see it. After that it has worked perfectly.

i stopped using tversity a long time ago because it transcoded video to WMV and the resulting video was unwatchable.

Will it push the h.264 file straight to the PS3 or 360 without trying to decode it?

hmm not sure. I will have to check when I get home and see if I can remember which files I had that were h.264 encoded to test this.

TVersity will do anything you want as long as it has the codecs for it. I uninstalled everything and then installed the Combined Community Codec Pack and it does it fine. Now is it watchable? No, because my CPU can't transcode fast enough, but does it look great when it does manage to play a little bit? Yes.

TwonkyVision is probably a good bet today. I know mediatomb supports the PS3 and is working to get the 360 working as well.

With H.264 files and TVersity...can you stream them to the PS3 if they use the Matstroka (.mkv) container???

Thanks for the help...

I don't have any .mkv files but if the proper codecs are installed it should play. How does TVersity deal with audio? An mkv could have nearly any kind of audio in it.

tversity works just fine for h.264 encoded mpeg-4 files

although I did have to clean off my laptop to get it to work

and I still can't get the HD clips to stream, possibly due to network issues.

alright, so i discovered a minor annoyance with tversity last night. Actually, it could be kind of a deal breaker.

The reason I use a laptop as a media server is because laptops are cheap ($400 to start) and QUIET (fans that cycle up or down based on the heat of the machine).

This particular laptop is an old one and hence when the fans get going, it sounds like a vacuum cleaner. I actually burned out a hard drive on this laptop once upon a time so it's definitely seen it's fair share of really hot days.

TVersity, for whatever reason, is running at 10-20% of CPU capacity when it should be completely idle. It's not looking for files anymore so I'm not quite sure what the deal is. It's causing my laptop (which is in my family room) to be disturbingly loud while I'm trying to enjoy videos, slide shows, music, etc.

Once again, getting to the point : Is there a setting on TVersity to get it to calm down when it's not serving up files? Or alternatively is there a simpler server program out there that won't be a resource hog?

If you're not transcoding then TwonkeyVision is available.

is twonkyvision worth the $30?

also, i bought a vista pc over the weekend - why does the ps3 not recognize the tversity server on the vista pc?

Do you have Vista's firewall blocking TVersity. Only you know if Twonky is worth $30. Don't they have a demo?

I gave up on streaming for now. I started using usb sticks and external usb drives instead. Tversity's quality just wasn't doing it for me. Yes it adds a few minutes to my watching something, but to me its worth it.

If these things can ever read straight from a NAS drive I would be very very happy.

Does Twonkeyvision transcode also?

Use Super from erightsoft. It is free and has a specific output container for the PS3. This allows Tversity to stream it natively to the PS3. Super and Tversity is a great combination that works fine for me.

Good luck!

-Jim

Does Twonkeyvision transcode also?
I don't think so.

Does TVersity always transcode? I am running it on a Windows XP machine, and I thought it was just serving up the H.264 files for the PS3 to read? I am no expert, but the lack of CPU activity on the computer would seem to back this up. My files were made in Handbrake to be playable on the PS3 - and I thought that it is just being hed the raw file? In any case, they look pretty good.