I messed with TVersity a bunch, but I can't get it to transcode Quicktime MOV files into a format that works on the PS3.

The TVersity forums have some topics about that, but it's a mess and I can't figure out how to make it work.

Anyone have any experience with that, or can offer a good alternative to TVersity that works on Server2003?

Much like .AVI, .MOV is just a generic container that can contain upteen billion different types of audio or video codecs. Knowing what the actual codecs are will probably help expose what the problem is.

(coming back to this after a break)

Do you have a favorite tool to determine what the codecs are inside a given movie file? Digging into the file properties menus of Quicktime and Windows Media Player doesn't seem to offer enough detail for me.

GSpot works for AVI files. It might work for MOVs.

Thanks! I'll give that a try.

I don't really use a utility outside Command-I in the Finder or Quicktime. With a Mac Mini under the TV and Perian, formats still haven't been much of a concern.

WMV support via Quicktime remains terrible. The import process using Flip4Mac is atrocious.

I've used a program called AVICodec with good success.

Edit: upon further scrutiny, it looks like it's been 2 years since the last build. Looks like perhaps it's been merged into MediaInfo? (last release 4/17/09)

Thanks for the link to that program John. Should come in mighty handy on both Windows and Mac OS.

I've just been using ffmpegx and QuickTime Player to check info on any given file.

BItt, what do you mean the "import process" when using Flip4Mac's WMV decoder? The last WMV files I've played "just worked" transparently with QuickTime Player.

I do prefer to use MPlayer if I can though, since it supports convenient skipping instead of FFWD/REW.

I'll have to get home before I can be precise, but whenever I try to play a WMV via Quicktime/Flip4Mac, it pops up a progress bar that details its import or conversion process. With videos of any length, it takes many minutes before it even starts playing video.

I too get the progress bar when opening WMV files. Most of the time it's quite quick but on occasion it's annoyingly slow. Nowadays I come across very few WMVs, I've pretty much banned the creation of them at work.

It might have something to do with the fact that I keep my videos on a network share. Maybe it's processing the entire thing before it starts playing.

Coming back to this thread after a while...

I'm now running a fairly successful media server installation that combines TVersity and Chorale.

I can:

- Play any video or audio file stored on the server's local hard disk or on shared network drives. Including my entire Rio-Central-hosted music collection, thanks to Peter's Chorale software.

- Play many types of video streams from the internet, such as YouTube videos and TV episodes, including Hulu videos.

- Play all of the above things on my Playstation 3, Xbox 360, or DirecTV DVR. Some of the videos play directly (if the playback device natively supports the codec), others get transcoded on-the-fly by TVersity.

There are significant limitations to all of the above, though. Part of the problem is that the spare computer I chose for the media server happens to be an old POS without decent memory or CPU. So the hulu videos are slideshows, and if something needs to be transcoded, you've got to wait for it to buffer and there is a slight degradation that happens in the transcoding process. If I were to upgrade the server, those problems would be mitigated.

For most situations, such as just watching an MPEG video file, it works great: No transcoding, things Just Work.

It was surprisingly difficult to get it all working correctly though! Here's some things I had to do:

- TVersity comes with a codec pack, but it wasn't enough. I needed to install CCCP as well, and I had to install TVersity and CCCP in the right order. I also had to install Quicktime and Real Alternative so I could get those codecs. And I had to tweak all of the codec settings (mostly just enabling video and audio codecs that were disabled by default). I had a collection of random video files of all different codec types, and there were many that stumped the system until I poked around in the codec settings to make them work. There are still a few holdouts that continue to stump the system, but for now it plays a majority of my files. The GSpot program that Bitt linked was invaluable in helping me locate the codec issues.

- The codecs can't handle it if you're remote-desktopped into the server computer with the option enabled to redirect the audio to your remote desktop client. This was the reason for all of my "Data is Corrupted" messages on the PS3. All I had to do was reconfigure my remote desktop session so that it didn't try to stream me the audio, and then the transcoders worked properly.

- Of the three devices, the PS3 seems to be the best at playing media. It plays the most media types and has the fewest problems with the streaming. The Xbox and DirecTV DVR sometimes mess up playback in various ways. Also, the Xbox can't see Chorale, but the PS3 can. Not sure why.

Anyway. Fun times.

Thanks for the summary Tony. You'd cemented in my mind that UPnP isn't universal, is generally a mess, and not worth really investing any time in exploring. I'd come to a similar conclusion after seeing the general state of affairs with clients - there simply don't seem to be any good ones - certainly nothing that comes even close to what I'm already using.

Proprietary is definitely the way to go. I mean, the proprietary system can be open source, but there doesn't seem to be any "standard" that's worth anything at all except as a sticker or check-box on some product literature or packaging.

For the record, the problems I encountered have nothing to do with UPNP. All of that worked fine. The clients never had a problem seeing the server or communicating with the server.

My only problems were related to trying to cobble together many disparate media sources and trying to get them to *all* play on one consumer device. It's really the whole transcoding thing that's the issue, not UPNP itself.

Let me be even more specific: The UPNP standard is pretty great, in that it lets a consumer device like the Playstation detect a media server and voilà, it plays the files.

The only problem comes when you've got crap for the files. Software like TVersity goes a long way towards solving that problem, it's just not the perfect solution yet. It's about as close as it gets, though, from what I've seen.

Anyone know of a *better* solution than TVersity?

But the connectivity is just a small part of the whole solution. Most consumers would expect the whole thing to just work and it doesn't seem to judging from the difficulties expressed elsewhere as well.

You've pointed out the specific downfall, which is playback. The solution isn't "universal" if it can only handle a small number of file formats and codecs. Most consumers won't accept that the "universal" nomenclature applies only to the ability to see the shares on the network.

In the end what's supposed to be a simplification ends up being a complication in that one is stuck being able to play some files but not others, then being able to play a different set with yet a different client, etc.

And if that weren't enough, then even media playback applications that are otherwise decent at format support stumble on UPnP - Boxee for instance (reading some random sampling of forum posts). At that point one can just forgo the UPnP and just create a regular share which programs like Boxee or Plex will happily connect to and play from.

I keep reading about people trying to cobble things together along with fielding questions from friends about this type of setup. Some of these people are trying DVD players with USB, consoles and other pokey solutions like running apps on an iPod to connect to a music hare on a household PC. At least for music I can give them a universal answer - SqueezeBox or if you want a whiter-looking solution and private wireless network, Sonos. For video it's a little bit more mixed, but the only thing out there I can recommend with any confidence that doesn't use a PC at the TV is that Sage Extender box I've mentioned. Otherwise Boxee or Plex (which are both based on XBMC) seem to be the best bet.

I'm having a nightmare at the moment. I've been storing all my video and audio files on my ReadyNAS and playing them back on my PS3. Up until recently it's worked really well with the PS3 playing pretty much everything I've thrown at it. A couple of weeks ago I updated the firmware on the PS3 and ever since 95% of my media is now unplayable.

Yes, the designers of UPnP have somehow managed to make it both over-engineered and under-specified.


UPnP also falls under the same rule of thumb as IMAP mail: that people who don't realise that what they're designing is a remote filesystem, are destined to design a crap remote filesystem.


Yes. Squeezebox have certainly solved the audio problem; Sonos might have too, but I know less about Sonos (do you get server plug-ins like the Squeezebox ones?). If you don't care about video or photo, then you now no longer need a universal remote to control audio playback, nor an amplifier with more than one input.

Nobody that I know of has yet solved the video problem as definitively, and of course what you actually want (because video has an audio track too) is for your audio solution and your video solution to be the same thing, so, again, no universal remote is required, and your TV and your audio amplifier both spend their entire lives switched to just one input. (Um, unless you do gaming; maybe if you do, you just need to hope that the Xbox and/or PS3 UPnP clients are worth using.)

The reason I pay attention to UPnP, is that it seems to me that whoever does solve the video problem first, will likely do so using UPnP. The Squeezebox stuff doesn't obviously extend to video, and Sonos is UPnP, albeit with some proprietary extensions. And even so there'll be servers that can't serve certain content, and clients that can't play certain other content. But if there's ever even so much as one good server and one good client, that's the problem better-solved than it has been yet.

Peter

Interesting.

If you can A/B a playable versus an unplayable file and look at the codecs with GSpot (linked above) you might be able to find out what's up.

Does the ReadyNAS try to detect that you've got a playstation, and then transcode (or deliberately not transcode) for it? Maybe the firmware upgrade makes the ReadyNAS fail to detect it properly.

Good point.

I do, however, like TVersity's ability to let me set up things like Video RSS feeds and other web-based video/audio sources which it can then turn around and feed to my playback client. That's something a simple fileshare can't do.

I have been playing with Boxee a lot lately and I'm excited about it. Out of the box, without any configuration, there is an absolute ton of free media available to you.

On the plus side, you don't have to run a separate server to handle transcoding. As a result, your files look better and load much quicker.

The downside is you need an AppleTV, Intel Mac, or Ubuntu Linux box. The AppleTV is cheap and quiet, but it also chokes on a lot of HD material over 720p. Mac Mini is appealing for its size, quietness, and bundled features (optical audio), but it's costly compared to the AppleTV. Ubuntu Linux box is probably the cheapest of them all since many of us will have something lying around. The problem is making a PC quiet and having it look like it belongs in your media rack.

I'm actually going to give Boxee a shot on an old P4 2.4GHz machine running Ubuntu Jaunty tonight. Hopefully it goes as smoothly as the Mac installs have gone.

Yeah, the Boxee thing sounds fun, but I've already got a Mac Mini hooked up to the TV that plays all this media just fine. I just liked the idea of my game consoles and my DVR *also* being able to play the media.

It's been documented on several forums and been reported to Sony by other users. The ReadyNAS doesn't do any transcoding as far as I'm aware, it just serves the files. I can't be bothered to go through the files and figure out which codecs it no longer plays, life's too short to sit down and do that. Suffice it to say my folder of Sarah Connor Chronicles I bittorrented no longer play.

What ReadyNAS firmware do you have? There was a semi recent update (4.1.5) that swapped out the UPnP server software.

An update to this thread. A firmware upgrade on the NAS didn't seem to fix things. However, a system update on the PS3 has. So I'm going to be very careful in future when updates come out for the PS3.

If it happened again I'd probably consider a purpose-built uPnP STB like the Netgear EVA series.

Ah. Yeah. I haven't downloaded that system update yet. I wonder if it will solve a few playback issues I've had on a few odd file formats I've got?