House of Pain

Until recently, there has been an ongoing problem with streaming content to your Playstation 3. In order to stream any content you are forced to either use a streaming program or use an external hard drive. The choice is yours as to which way you want to play your files. But if you would like more flexibility, I would suggest Tversity. This program is excellent in many ways, but it has some minor downfalls.

Tversity is a freeware program that allows you to have a DNLA compliant server in which your PS3 can see data. In addition to being DNLA compliant, Tversity is able to transcode different media types to where it can be played. This means various file types such as avi, mp4, divx, mpeg2, etc. It can be quite powerful pending you know how to encode your video files.

I can confirm that Tversity works with firmware 2.10 for the PS3. I can stream a single .vob file from my PC to my PS3. This streaming will pass through 5.1 audio as well as maintain excellent video quality. Most of my findings have been trial and error as well as feeback from various members at avsforums.com

Getting Started

First things first. Lets download Tversity. Open up your browser and navigate to http://www.tversity.com/home

Install Tversity and follow all it’s prompts. You will end up setting up a service that will automatically start Tversity when your PC is booted up.

Once you have Tversity installed, open up the program.

Configuring Sharing

Here is what you should be greeted by:

Now in order to start sharing your files, we first have to tell Tversity where your files is located.

Click the + button in Tversity.

Once you click the + button you will be left with a drop down box. It will be asking you of several places where media may be present. You can add individual files, all the files located in a specific folder, etc. In this article I am going to focus on sharing all my media from a folder.

You will now have to specify where the files are located. For simplicity sake, I am merely going to browse for my folder in My Documents and select My Videos. This is where I keep my files located.

You are going to be going through a little queuing time. Tversity has to build up an entry for each file you have located in your My Videos. So if you have hundred’s of files, then you are going to be looking at a little bit of time before you can view every one of them on your PS3. Your end result should be something similar to the first picture I posted above.

Success !! You have now set up Tversity to stream files to your PS3. You can also add music and pictures in the exact same manner I described above.

Configuring Settings

After you completed the steps above, we have to configure our Settings in Tversity to permit files play correctly.

Transcoding Settings Picture (The photo couldn’t be resized down small enough so I am providing the link instead.)

Navigate to the Settings Tab in Tversity. You will need to edit these parameters to meet the criteria of your network, media, and TV capabilities.

Warning !! The video/image resolution should be set to the maximum of what your TV can handle. Otherwise you may not be able to display anything. Also, the option to lower the bitrate of the file that is being played if it is too high for your network, this is optional. Those on Wifi may have hit-n-miss choppiness. If you are on a wired network, then I recommend leaving this unchecked.

NOTE:  YOU MUST ALLOW TVERSITY ACCESS THROUGH YOUR FIREWALL. OTHERWISE YOUR PS3 WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SEE YOUR TVERSITY SHARES. YOU CAN EITHER A) DISABLE YOUR FIREWALL OR B)ADD AN EXCEPTION FOR TVERSITY TO HAVE ACCESS THROUGH THE FIREWALL.