Streaming Video From Linux To The Xbox 360 With Ushare

Roberto Carvajal

November 19, 2008


I had successfully setup ushare to stream multimedia content from my linux fileserver/p2p machine to my xbox 360 in order to reproduce the media on my tv without using xbox 360 hard drive space and without all the hassle that means burning disks or copying data to a pendrive, it works, the only problem right now is that xbox 360 doesn’t support any kind of subtitles, altough I can understand 99% of the english I hear, that’s not the case for the rest of the family. Anyways, this is what you have to do to get things working smooth.

First, of course, install ushare, I won’t give details because it changes from system to system, I recommend you to use your distribution package system to get this one installed.

After the install you need to add a multicast route so the upnp discovery protocol can work, add this to your /etc/rc.local if you want this to run on each boot, just change eth0 to your real network interface.

route add -net 239.0.0.0 netmask 255.0.0.0 eth0
ifconfig eth0 allmulti

Either run that manually now or reboot, after that you should see your route like this:

[root@tangerine ~]# route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
192.168.0.0     *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth0
239.0.0.0       *               255.0.0.0       U     0      0        0 eth0
default         Lucius          0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0

Now edit ushare config, mine is at /etc/ushare.conf

# /etc/ushare.conf
# Configuration file for uShare</code>
 
# uShare UPnP Friendly Name (default is 'uShare').
USHARE_NAME=uShare
 
# Interface to listen to (default is eth0).
# Ex : USHARE_IFACE=eth1
USHARE_IFACE=eth0
 
# Port to listen to (default is random from IANA Dynamic Ports range)
# Ex : USHARE_PORT=49200
USHARE_PORT=
 
# Port to listen for Telnet connections
# Ex : USHARE_TELNET_PORT=1337
USHARE_TELNET_PORT=
 
# Directories to be shared (space or CSV list).
# Ex: USHARE_DIR=/dir1,/dir2
USHARE_DIR=/home/shared/multimedia
 
# Use to override what happens when iconv fails to parse a file name.
# The default uShare behaviour is to not add the entry in the media list
# This option overrides that behaviour and adds the non-iconv'ed string into
# the media list, with the assumption that the renderer will be able to
# handle it. Devices like Noxon 2 have no problem with strings being passed
# as is. (Umlauts for all!)
#
# Options are TRUE/YES/1 for override and anything else for default behaviour
USHARE_OVERRIDE_ICONV_ERR=
 
# Enable Web interface (yes/no)
ENABLE_WEB=yes
 
# Enable Telnet control interface (yes/no)
ENABLE_TELNET=
 
# Use XboX 360 compatibility mode (yes/no)
USHARE_ENABLE_XBOX=yes
 
# Use DLNA profile (yes/no)
# This is needed for PlayStation3 to work (among other devices)
ENABLE_DLNA=no

Notice the USHARE_ENABLE_XBOX=yes?, turns out that in the default config file the option is named just ENABLE_XBOX which doesn’t work, the correct option name is USHARE_ENABLE_XBOX. Now after your config is OK you should start ushare, then go to your xbox, select multimedia -> videos and press X button to load videos from another source, if everything is OK there you should see your uShare source.

Thanks to this blog, I found the config flag fix. All kudos and greets to that guy.

Enjoy.

tony —  April 17, 2009 9:01 pm

Thanks for this great summary. I followed your instructions and was able to stream videos from my Ubuntu 8.10 server to my Xbox 360. Excellent work!

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