My struggles with TVersity have come to an end for the moment, and I’m quite happy with that. After struggling for many hours to get it working under wine on my ubuntu machine, I decided to try out vmware running virtual windows xp. it took all of a couple of hours, most of which was a windows installation, and i had TVersity working from virtual xp on my ubuntu box. It works well enough to be able to stream music to my psp without any skipping, and I have even tested it with streaming video to an xbox 360. Although I haven’t actually confirmed that it does do any conversion, it seems to be do the job for all the videos I have.

I used this tutorial to get vmware installed on my ubuntu gutsy machine, and it was a relatively easy process from there to get windows xp installed. I also found this little tutorial to get samba file sharing working as a network location on virtual xp to add files from for TVersity, and some useful advice on codec packs to install, even for mythtv files. I already had samba file sharing working on my machine, but hopefully it works for others to get theirs working.

Although these tutorials are ubuntu gutsy specific, they shouldn’t be too different for other versions on ubuntu, or other linux distros. If you feel you need to, just have a quick search of google for vmware and your distro name, you will probably find several guides to be able to help you.

One issue I have had trouble with, however, is on the fly encoding and downloading to my psp. It would seem that the psp isn’t patient enough to wait for the video to encode on the server end, and times out while waiting. This hasn’t been too big a deal as I haven’t really done much video watching on my psp lately, but it would be nice to have either that working or be able to stream videos to it. I am fully aware that you can stream video to your psp from the ps3, and that the ps3 can source its videos from tversity running on a pc, but this seems to be a very drawn out process, and requires a ps3, a very expensive solution to my problem. I guess that will have to wait until can afford a ps3. *sigh*

I noticed that my last post on tversity and psp streaming got a lot of hits from google, so maybe this post will help out alot of people to get tversity running until a linux compatable version in released.