Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"There are a bunch of solutions on the Internet today for streaming media from your PC to your console of choice. But that doesn't mean all of them are good. In fact, you'll never know whether a given tool works for you unless you spend the requisite half-hour installing it, configuring it for streaming, firing up your console, trying to connect to your PC, et cetera. It's a process. But at least allow us to do our part in reducing your streaming nightmare. We've rounded up a batch of our favorite freeware applications for streaming media from a PC to a console, as well as a handy encoding tool in case you still can't get your huge movies to work just right."

While I've found the idea of transcoding all my DVD's for streaming across the network. I've frankly found the whole process a bit frustrating. There are just too many different formats and none of them work on everything. But if you are interested, this article covers the Combined Community Codec Pack, ps3mediaserver, orb (which I used for a while), TVersity (which I never seemed to be able to get to work), and GOTsent. The one I had the most success with (even though it is not listed here) is Handbrake. Any other tools you think are better?

I just finished making three DVDs using Nero Vision , and after burning the third one I thought "I guess I should make sure they turned out ok before I give them away". I didn't expect to have any problems, because the three source WMV files were perfect. Imagine my surprise when I tested the first DVD with Nero Showtime and discovered that the audio drops out after the first 90 seconds. I tested the DVD again inside Windows Media Player, and the results were the same. GAH! I hate it when software fails to produce the results it's supposed to - Nero Vision gave me no indication of a problem with the transcoding, the preview was perfect, and all three burns completed without error. And, yes, I checked two of the three discs and the problem was the same on both. I'm now re-doing the project with Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0...and if that doesn't work, I swear I'll switch to Sony Vegas right away!