The TV via computer thread

[Butter]

My wife and I bought a new computer yesterday. The make and model is not important as I don't really wish this to turn into a "why didn't you build your own" or "why did you buy it there" thread, etc. It is a mid-range computer, and it came with a super-nice 20" LCD monitor. It also came with Windows Vista. Ugh, right? Well, we are still working through that. Everything has been fine so far.

We hooked up our DirecTV HD box to the internet a while back to get On Demand, but since we don't have any of the premium channels, that has been pretty useless. I did notice though that when we were installing everything on the new machine, that the computer recognized "DirecTV Mediashare" as... something. I don't even know what. Then I went to the DirecTV website and noticed that they have a couple of things going on: DIRECTV2PC, which allows you to watch DVR'd content on your PC. Also, DirecTV MediaShare allows you to view pictures and listen to music from your library via your TV. Kinda useless. But it also supposedly lets you watch videos from your computer on your TV. Now that's interesting. Finally might get me to convert all these home videos I have lying around to digital copies if I can just dial it up on my TV and watch them without having to sort through all the videos.

Now the interesting one... some of the threads on the DirecTV forums were talking about the usefulness of a program called TVERSITY. Apparently, with TVERSITY, you can stream content from certain sites online directly to your TV via your XBox360, PS3, Wii, or even your DirecTV HD box (including Hulu, CBS, NBC, and more). It also will play videos in just about any format and convert it automatically to a format your preferred box can use, and then will display on TV. Right now, the program is free, so I am looking forward to giving it a try tonight. I have 3 of these various boxes (the XBox, Wii, and HD box), so it would be pretty awesome if I could use the Wii for the kids room for them to watch kid movies whenever, then the XBox360 or HD box for the living room to watch movies or TV shows I stream or download (totally legally, of course.... totally).

I am positive this is going to be a mess of compatibility problems at first, but I am hopeful I can get everything up and running and actually feel like my house is properly networked for once (ok, i still need a wireless router for the living room so I can scrap this 50 foot cable running from the router to my computer to connect the XBox and HD box, but one step at a time here).

Thought I would just throw out our starting point and see what everyone else is doing, because there is a good mix of people on here, mostly technologically enlightened. I am somewhat behind most but hope to move more into the 21st century here, although I would never commit to giving up cable altogether like some of my friends have. That's just crazy-talk.

I mean, I thought it was pretty freakin' awesome that I could stream Netflix onto my XBox360 when I discovered that at Christmas. But I know some of you do way more complicated stuff than that. Anyway, just wondering if anyone had more thoughts on this subject, and what kind of setups people have.

[DataKing]

I've used TVersity on occasion in the past, and find it to be a pretty slick program. I'm not a heavy user by any stretch, but I've had no problems with the limited uses I've attempted (mostly just to watch network shows I've missed...DL them via torrent or whatever, then play them on my TV through the Xbox360 via Tversity.

[Alan T]

I looked at Tversity for a bit, but the problem I had is that it uses uPnP to function which does not support streaming formats that I need.

I have purchased close to 800-900 DVDs , and once upon a time I bought a huge DVD player that held 500 DVDs. I eventually filled it up and it became annoying having to swap in and out dvds all of the time to watch. Plus I had issues where my younger daughters would get hold of the DVDs and mess them up (scratches, rub marks, etc).

What I ended up doing is buying a NAS that I put two 1.5 TB drives into. Every time I buy a dvd now, I make an ISO backup of the movie and place it on the NAS. I then put the dvd back in its case and box them up in storage (I have 5 huge boxes of nothing but dvds in storage).

I then got a device called Popcorn Hour A-110 which has a gigabit ethernet port on it, plus HDMI/Component/Composite/Svideo connections for the TV. The A-110 comes with a remote control, or you can program a Logitech Harmony Universal Remote to control it. I set up the A-110 to map a drive to the NAS, and then just use the remote control to scroll through the movies that I have on the NAS. Since the device uses SMB or NFS (your choice), it is able to play any format at all which is something that Tversity or other uPnP type applications were not able to do.

I also have a Blu-Ray player that has netflix built into it where I can watch netflix online directly from the blu-ray player (it also has pandora internet radio as well).

Those are my main two forms of media these days (the third being obviously cable tv).. but for someone who is a huge movie fan and buys tons of movies, this is a way that technology has really made my hobby more enjoyable.

For people interested in more info on Digital Media streaming, a great forum that I found that really helped me get going is: Digital Media Servers & Content Streamers - AVS Forum