After the initial novelty of my Pinncle Showenter 200 wore off 2 years ago, it has seen regular use, but its many limitations have kept me from experimenting and finding new ways of putting the device to good use. This all changed last weekend, when I checked the Pinnacle site for updates and noticed that there is a new firmware (21-81 BETA). The upgrade was uneventful and when I tried out the box, the results were initially disappointing. The same clips that had not worked before still did not work …
But since I was curious about other things that might have become available since I last researched this years ago, I googled – and found TVersity. Once I installed the server, turning off the Pinnacle Media Server was an easy decision. TVersity has a number of clear advantages over the Pinnacle server that makes using the Showcenter fun again.
- The server can transcode streams to what the streaming client supports. This adds support for WMV7 and WMV8 content, which is transcoded to WMV9.
- YouTube and other Flash content is now available
- Internet Radio – Audio Streams in Windows Media format are now available (before I had to run Shoutcast on the server to transcode any WM stations that I was interested in)
- My son’s Wii has become an alternative streaming client in a matter of minutes, and it supports pretty much everything I use the Showcenter for