|
If you have a video game console (PS3 or XBOX 360) you owe it to yourself to look into expanding how it functions with your media. Here are two free software solutions for Windows that work really with with giving you more options about getting media to your console.
The next gen consoles have a lot more functionality than simply playing games. Both are capable of streaming your content (photos, music, video) from your PC to wherever your console is connected. Even if your console and PC isn't in the same room, as long as they're hooked up to your network they should be capable of talking to each other. Windows comes with Windows Media Player 11 which can stream your media (and is free) but in all honesty I've never had a lot of luck with it. It doesn't work with the PS3 either (to my knowledge) so finding a solution that will worth with both consoles is probably a better choice. The first piece of software that I recommend is TVersity. It works with both the PS3 and 360, is free, and will stream your content to your console seamlessly. Even better is that if the content you want to stream isn't supported by the console then TVersity will use your PC to 'transcode' the data on the fly into something your console will understand. For example, if you have video files in a different format (MKV, MOV, etc) TVersity will understand that your console doesn't support that data type and will convert your media on the fly so that your console is able to play it back (to a format it can understand). All of this is configurable and works relatively well but depends a lot on the horsepower of your PC. To convert your content on the fly without having hiccups or slowdowns you need a decent speed PC. Since the software is free it's worth investigating anyway to see how it works for you. 
You can find out more information on TVersity here . Another new piece of software that is starting to how it's use is PlayOn. What this software does is provide a nice way to stream a lot of the internet content that exists to your console using your PC. Neither console is particularly suited to stream internet content but with PlayOn it uses your PC as the host to buffer the information from the internet to your console using your console's own interface. This software includes support of YouTube, CNN, Hulu, Netflix and CBS. The software is still beta though and the content isn't available to all countries but is worth checking out and experiementing with if you're adventurous. 
You can find out more information on PlayOn here . |
