TVersity

 01/10/2009 17:14:16  ♥ written by vu ()

As you know, I have other interests outside of music, so taking a break from writing about music, I thought you guys may be interested in hearing what's going on in my struggle for media on the television. I'm closely following CES coverage, and happy to see newer television models will come equipped with wireless connnectivity. This is pretty sweet, considering that if you're like me, you get your programming via netflix or hulu.

I was on the lookout for getting my own media receiver/player, and there's just not a lot of appealing players with equally appealing price (read: cheap). What I'm looking for is a product that can play back my media files, plus connect to the internet to watch Netflix, Hulu, CBS, etc. I do not want the product to be reliant on a media server nor do I want to hack it to get it to function (I'm looking at you Apple TV).

Since I'm probably never going to get one that will work for me, instead I'm currently playing around with free TVersity, since ditching PlayOn (the trial was only 15 days and there was no compelling features that would warrant me paying $30 for beta product).

TVersity, based on testing it, works pretty well, that is if you don't use their transcoding or interface! Best of all, you can launch Safari on your iPhone and and point to your IP address: xxx.xxx.x.x:41952 and it will automatically take you to the sharing folders of TVersity. Music and videos plays flawlessly on the iPod and works amazing if you use that same method on your PS3 using their built-in browser.

If you want to test it out for yourself, here's how you find your IP address, on Windows:

• Go to Control Panel: Networking Connections: Local Area Connection.
• Double click on the icon and go to the "Support" tab and it will list your IP address.
  
  On Macs I'm sure it's a lot simpler

I did test out their rival, Orb's player on the iPhone and was not impressed with its image quality (or the fact that you have to pay $10 for the full version). It's still very early on, so until Sling or Netflix (very doubtful since they haven't even made their streaming service work on Firefox or the mac) comes up with their own product, I'm sticking with TVersity for the time being.

PS, will someone please make a working product to watch over-the-air television that doesn't require a media server for the iPhone?