TVersity is pretty nifty

Being without XP Media Center Edition (or Vista MCE for that matter), I didn't start playing with the 360's streaming music/video capabilities until a few weeks ago. I opted for installing Windows Media Player 11, using the share options within and have been pretty pleased.
The downside of course is that videos must be WMV format or death to you and your files. Bummer.

I found one application, Encode 360, which will convert various video formats to WMV's. It's really slick and for the most part has worked very well, but it takes a while to process a 2hr movie on my laptop and sometimes it fails halfway through.

Last night I downloaded TVersity, after seeing the link in some comments on Major Nelson's blog. It has a ton of features that I won't explain here, but I will say that I got it to stream small non-WMV files from my laptop to the 360. This bypasses using WMP11, the Zune software or any other MS products, if that is your desire. I tried a couple longer DivX files and the server just crashed, so I need to look into that further. But TVersity seems very diverse - it can function in this sense, as a way to get files to your 360/home theater setup, or also as a media server that you can hit from other pc's. Not sure if you can pull files via the Intertubes, but I believe it's possible.

Which reminds me, I ought to check out Orb as well, since I think it has some similar capabilities. Orb was just recently highlighted by Tank in the 2o2p forums.

At any rate, if you're looking for a media server solution, check out TVersity. I'll try to update with any more successes as I play with it more. Not having to convert everything manually to WMV would sure be nice. Not as nice as if MS just let us play whatever we want on our 360s, but still...