TVersity Media Server for your PSP

TVersity Media Server is a free application that lets you manage your internet and home media by creating a personalized lineup of channels or Personal Entertainment Guide (PEG). It then serves this media to your device, overcoming limitations by doing all the necessary conversions for your media to be available anytime and anywhere for you on any device. So what it’s saying is it that all you need to do is enjoy your media while it does all the work.

It can support almost any type of media as well as streaming protocol coming from your home network or the Internet, such as live and on demand Internet streams. This means that you can have access to Internet TV and radio, Podcasts, photo blogs and more. You’re all set if your device supports UPnP AV/DLNA standard (TVs, DVDs, Stereo Receivers,Digital Media Adapaters/Receivers, Mobile Phones, etc.) or has a web browser like XHTML-MP or WAP 2.0 and media streaming capabilities (Mobile Phones, PDAs, the Sony PSP) or something that has an RSS reader and media streaming or downloading capabilities (Sony PSP, iTunes/iPod).

If you already have your gear of your choice (Mine is a Sony PSP, so from this point on the article will focus on how to run the application on a PSP), just crosscheck if you meet the minimum requirements to make TVersity run on it.

 Minimum System Requirements:

• Pentium III 700 Mhz or better (Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz with support for Hyper Threading is recommended)
• 128 MB of memory or more (512 MB recommended)
• 50 MB of disk space (At least 1 GB of free space is recommended for cache area of transcoded media)
• Windows XP or Windows 2000
• DirectX 9.0 or higher
• Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher
• Audio enabled on the computer running the software
• Flash version 7 for the GUI (MSIE version 6.0 required for full GUI functionality, other Flash enabled browsers such as Firefox will have most but not all of the functionality.)

Download: [TVersity Media Server]

The TVersity installation guide awaits after the jump!

TVersity Media Server is a free application that lets you manage your internet and home media by creating a personalized lineup of channels or Personal Entertainment Guide (PEG). It then serves this media to your device, overcoming limitations by doing all the necessary conversions for your media to be available anytime and anywhere for you on any device. So what it’s saying is it that all you need to do is enjoy your media while it does all the work.

It can support almost any type of media as well as streaming protocol coming from your home network or the Internet, such as live and on demand Internet streams. This means that you can have access to Internet TV and radio, Podcasts, photo blogs and more. You’re all set if your device supports UPnP AV/DLNA standard (TVs, DVDs, Stereo Receivers,Digital Media Adapaters/Receivers, Mobile Phones, etc.) or has a web browser like XHTML-MP or WAP 2.0 and media streaming capabilities (Mobile Phones, PDAs, the Sony PSP) or something that has an RSS reader and media streaming or downloading capabilities (Sony PSP, iTunes/iPod).

If you already have your gear of your choice (Mine is a Sony PSP, so from this point on the article will focus on how to run the application on a PSP), just crosscheck if you meet the minimum requirements to make TVersity run on it.

 Minimum System Requirements:

• Pentium III 700 Mhz or better (Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz with support for Hyper Threading is recommended)
• 128 MB of memory or more (512 MB recommended)
• 50 MB of disk space (At least 1 GB of free space is recommended for cache area of transcoded media)
• Windows XP or Windows 2000
• DirectX 9.0 or higher
• Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher
• Audio enabled on the computer running the software
• Flash version 7 for the GUI (MSIE version 6.0 required for full GUI functionality, other Flash enabled browsers such as Firefox will have most but not all of the functionality.)

Now, to the good part. Installation.

But first things first, make sure that no previously installed copy of the software is running on any of the machines on your home network (Note: Internet Explorer users will need to rename the file and restore the .exe suffix before running it). Uninstall old versions, except, if you have Version 0.8 or higher, since you can just upgrade it. Because if you uninstall it,  shared URLs will be lost and won’t be copied to the new installation. After downloading the latest version locate the setup file. The first thing you’d notice is is that it doesn’t have a .exe suffix. You’d have to rename the file and give it the .exe suffix due to some security software/practice. Run the installation wizard.

When you’re done with the installation follow these steps:

• If you have a personal firewall running or the Windows firewall is running please make sure that the executable MediaServer.exe located under the installation folder of the software (c:\Program Files\TVersity\Media Server by default) is allowed to accept incoming connections on the port used by the media server (which is by default port 41952) (it is not necessary to specify the port on most personal firewalls, however your system will be more secure if you do so).

• For transcoding purposes you will need to make sure you can play in Windows Media Player all the media formats you wish TVersity to handle. If you cannot play some format via Windows Media Player you will not be able to play it via TVersity and so you will need to install additional directshow software components to overcome this issue. Please refer to the TVersity download page for a list of possible add-ons you may need.

• In addition to that, you may need to change the log-on account of the TVersity service (by default it is set to the local system account) to a user account in which Windows Media Player was installed and in which you intend to install additional directshow components (these are necessary in order to provide decoding for the media formats you need). Please refer to this FAQ section for step by step instructions on how to do that. If you have no intention to play online media and to do any kind of transcoding then you can leave the log-on account as is, otherwise leave it as is for now and later on if you experience transcoding issues, consider changing it.

• At this point make sure the server is running and responding by opening the following URL http://localhost:41952/, which will start the TVersity GUI. You can also try the URL http://localhost:41952/lib which will open only the portion of the GUI that lets you browse your media library.

• You may want to know that you can access the TVersity GUI from any machine on your network by replacing the localhost in the above URLs with the IP address or name of the machine running TVersity.

And here’s the part you’ve been waiting for – testing it with the Sony PSP that’s 2.6 or higher.

• In order to access the media library from the Sony PSP, please start the Sony PSP web browser and enter the address http://host:41952/lib where the IP address or name of the computer running TVersity is used instead of the word host. You can find out the name of your computer on Windows by right clicking the My Computer icon on your desktop, selecting Properties from the menu, and then selecting the Computer Name tab on the window that just opened.

• At this point the media library is still empty since you haven’t yet shared any media, however you will be able to access online content from the TVersity content guides. Click on Audio and then on TVersity Audio Guide and you should see a list of Internet radio stations that are included in your media library for demonstration purposes. You may expect to play the radio stations by clicking on them, however the PSP web browser is configured to download music files when clicking on them and store them on your memory card. While this behavior is useful for downloading music tracks from your media library to the PSP (for playback when no network connection is available), it will not allow you to play live content such as these radio stations.

• Luckily the PSP RSS reader can do audio streaming, i.e. it can play the audio off the network without first downloading it, a necessary feature for playing live content. In order to see this feature in action, click on the RSS icon (the orange icon at the top right corner of the TVersity toolbar) and this will result in the PSP browser asking if you wish to add this Podcast. Please select Yes, close the web browser and open the RSS reader. Navigate to the podcast you just added, select one of the radio stations and play it. After a few seconds (the time it takes to buffer some data off the Net for playback) you should be able to listen to the radio station on your PSP. At this point you can pause the station, rewind and then fast forward it, despite the fact that it is streaming live, because the TVersity server comes with built in support for time shifting.

• Once you share media from your home network (see step-by-step instructions below) you will be able to download it to the PSP (via the web browser) or stream it (via the RSS reader) in the same way as described above. Please note however that the PSP cannot handle folders inside RSS feeds and therefore only the music tracks inside the feed will be displayed in the PSP RSS Reader. This also means that if you add an RSS feed comprised only of folders (such as the root of the media library) nothing will be displayed in the PSP RSS Reader.

• Congratulations! You have successfully installed the server and used it to play online content on your Sony PSP.

If you want to give this a go with your other devices that it supports just drop them a line at their website for complete instructions.

Download: [TVersity Media Server]

Via tversity