I’m going to be buying an LCD TV and DVD player soon, so I want to first make sure I’m shopping for the right stuff.
Currently when I watch movies that I have stored on my PC on my TV, I do so by wirelessly transmitting them to my TiVO. The quality isn’t as great as it could be though and I have to use Videora TiVo Converter to convert to a format TiVO can understand.
Lots of movies I have on my PC are DivX. I found that there are DVD players that are WiFi Enabled such as this one and play DivX. Does this mean that I will be able to wirelessly transmit DivX movies to the DVD player using my wireless router? If so, this sounds like a good option for me. Any other ideas would be appreciated.
I don’t think that player will support playing movies from your PC over WiFi. The WiFi capability appears to be limited to the “VIERA Cast Online Content”, which from what I can tell is limited to a list of specific sites through a custom interface (Netflix, Amazon VOD, YouTube, some others).
However, that DVD player should play the DivX files if you copy them to a USB stick or SD card and insert it directly into the player. So there’s an extra step involved to watch on the TV.
I’ve heard of people setting up what you want (play video from your PC over WiFi on a device connected to the TV) using game consoles (Xbox 360 or PS3). Not sure if you want to try going that route. I have a PS3 but haven’t tried doing that yet.
I havea slightly different set up.
3 different PCs with wireless keyboards and mice, hooked up to 3 LCD TVs, connected with my wireless network and all they share a 1 TB network drive.
All TVs plus my laptop have access to Satellite TV, DVR, Movies, Music, Internet, etc. independently.
That sounds like a good alternative. I guess in that case I could get a cheaper DVD player that has a USB port but isn’t WiFi enabled since I’m not interested in Netflix, Amazon VOD, etc.
I’m using TiVO desktop now, but I didn’t realize the Plus version could transmit DivX and XviD without having to use Videora first. Thanks! Gonna check it out now.
A friend of mine just bought a Samsung TV (LN40C650) and I plugged a USB hard drive into it and it played Divx movies fine. According to the manual, it can play files from a PC across the net, but I didn’t test it. The only bummer was that it couldn’t play avchd files.
Did a little research and it looks like you want to find a “DLNA certified” player. That’s what the PS3 uses to stream video from a PC. So something like this:
should be able to do what you want. It seems to have built in WiFi adapter, and DLNA player support. It also has USB ports which I’m assuming you can play files off of.
The only tricky part might be setting up the DLNA server on your PC. Windows Media Player 11 supports it, or you can find a separate server application to use. I’m going to try WMP11 tonight with my PS3.
I found a couple articles and YouTube video that you may find helpful. The first article says Windows Media Player version 11 is is more complex and less reliable than using TVersity which has a free version. The YouTube video is for Windows 7.
I tried last night, and couldn’t get any videos to work in Windows Media Player 11. Apparently it doesn’t support MP4 videos (at least not without a codec). Since I was hoping to have the option to stream to the iPod touch as well I probably can’t use it.
I tried TVersity and it worked, but I had a lot of stuttering, maybe because someone was using the internet at the same time (on the streaming computer) or I picked the wrong handbrake profile for the video and it was too much data to stream wireless. It definitely wasn’t doing any transcoding, just streaming. Also, it wouldn’t let me stream to the iPod with the free version :(.
It seems like the hardest part here is figuring out what format to store the videos in to be able to stream them. I’ll have to play with the Handbrake conversions and see if the other profiles stream better.
I’m not sure what your exact setup is, but I gave up on DLNA servers. WMP11 can be made to play pretty much everything (check out the Shark007 codec pack), but I still found that, like your experience with TVersity, there was never a sufficient buffer, even for my relatively stable wired network. Nothing sucks more than getting 2 hours into a movie and then have it cut out, and because DLNA is just stream-and-forget, there’s no option to “resume.” I still like the idea of DLNA, but it’s just too frustrating.
I gave up and got a Western Digital WDTV Live box. It’s a tiny little thing that will play absolutely any format you can throw at it. It connects to any windows shared folder. I have all of my movies on a dedicated NAS box but you can play them from a windows computer just the same. You can also connect any USB hard drive or thumb drive to it. The interface isn’t exactly to my liking, but it’s a workhorse, that’s for sure. It also does full 1080p.
The only thing it’s missing that you might want is wifi.
You shouldn’t have a problem accessing any video format after that. Make sure you install the 64 bit version after the 32 bit version if you are running windows 7 64bit
I have had much success using PyTiVo to transfer just about any video format file from my PC to my TiVo for watching on our big screen TV. Takes a bit to get the software configured properly, but after that it’s very easy to use with our TiVo. http://scottsoapbox.com/2010/04/20/pytivo-install-instructions/
I found that same webpage yesterday and between getting frustrated with the install and my firewall telling me it was a known threat, I gave in and paid the $25 for TiVO Desktop Plus. Install literally took seconds- just had to add the serial number they emailed me to my free version of TiVO Desktop and restart the software. I’m happy.
I planned to move the cable modem and router next to the TV and use a splitter if he wants to do it. I figure a wired connection is more reliable and faster in any case.
