Page 2 of 3: Configuring Settings

Step 3: TVersity: Configuring Settings

Start the TVersity graphical user interface (if it isn't already started) by double clicking on the tray icon. Click on the "Settings" button at the top and we'll now configure TVersity.

In the "General" settings section, you can set the following options:

TVersity: General Settings


  • Media Playback Device: Set this to "Auto" or you can manually select the device you are connecting from (like "Sony Playstation 3" or "Xbox 360"), but this is only recommended if you only connect one type of device to this TVersity enabled computer.

  • Media Sharing Service: This is where you start, stop or restart the sharing service - if it is not started yet, you can click on the "Start Sharing" button to start it. The "Automatically start sharing ..." option when checked will automatically start the service whenever you start the computer.

  • Temporary Media Files: This specify the amount of disk space to use for caching/buffering purposes - the default 8192 MB (8 GB) setting should be more than enough.

  • Home Network: You can specify the port that TVersity will use (if you change the port settings, don't forget to change your firewall settings to match it), and also specify the IP address you wish to share content with (or leave it blank to allow sharing from all devices on the network). This option is best left alone for now, we'll get back to it if UPnP didn't work.

  • HTTP Proxy and Maximum Timeshift are not important, so leave the default settings there.

Press the "Save" button to save the settings.

In the "Media Library" section, you can set the following options:

TVersity: Media Library Settings


  • Media Library Menus: This option tells TVersity how it should present the navigational structure of your media folders. The "Default" option works well.

  • Media Library Refresh: This allows you tell TVersity when it should scan the media folders that we will add to TVersity later on for changes. You can always manually get TVersity to scan the shared folders to index the newly added files, but this option adds an automated task. You can specify when the first update occurs during the day, and then the duration between each subsequent updates.

  • Media Library Display Properties: These options allow you to specify how TVersity should display file names, whether tag data should be read from AVI files and so forth.

  • Media Library Reset: Only use this if the media library information becomes corrupt.

Press the "Save" button to save the settings.

In the "Transcoder" section, you can set the following options:

TVersity: Transcoder Settings


  • When to transcode? Set this to "Only when needed" - TVersity will scan the media file, see which device is trying to play it, and then if the device doesn't support the file natively, it will transcode it to a format that the device can play. Transcoding should be avoided unless absolutely necessary, to maintain quality and performance. You don't need to enable the "Decrease the bitrate ..." option unless your network connection from the computer to your device is limited (eg. wireless) - enabling this option has the effect of causing even natively supported media files to be transcoded when their bitrate is higher than the network limit, which will decrease quality, so don't select this option unless you have a slow network. A wired connection should be fast enough for most video, even HD video, while Wireless N is recommended for HD video.

  • Maximum Video and Image Resolution: These settings allow you to specify the maximum resolution video that TVersity will transcode to (if your video has a higher resolution, it will be converted to this maximum resolution - if your video has a lower resolution, the lower resolution will be used). Setting these settings to the resolution of your TV/display panel is recommended, unless you run into performance problems, in which case you can use half the resolution of your TV/panel (eg. 640x480) for lower quality video. Note that this only affects transcoded video - natively supported video won't be affected.

  • Windows Media Encoder: Check the box to use DirectShow for encoding to WMV (which is the format that is accepted by the Xbox 360), and probably leave the default selection of WMV 8 as the version of WMV to use. Again, technically, this option is not needed at all when dealing with natively supported files.

  • Optimization: Set this to "Quality", unless you have a slow computer.

  • Connection Speed and Quality: Change this to match the speed of your network. Increasing this above the speed of your actual network won't help, and will only make playback buffer all the time.

  • Compression: Set this to "Minimum" for maximum quality and better performance (but might overwhelm your network connection if it is not fast enough - a wired connection should be fast enough for most video, even HD video).

  • Decoding Speed: Leave this option checked.

Press the "Save" button to save the settings.

And finally, in the "Internet Feeds" section, you can set the feeds settings. Personally, I don't use this option, and older versions of TVersity had a problem where a lot of bandwidth was used by the updating of RSS feeds, so I prefer setting all of the settings to "1" (setting to "0" can sometimes mean "unlimited" which is even worse for bandwidth usage).

 

 


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