I have an old Xbox (with modchip) that I FTP video to, and use as a media player, but I decided to try and get streaming media working between Ubuntu and my shiny Xbox 360. Wow, what a to-do! It’s not exactly rocket science to get it working, but it took a lot of trial and error, Googling, and other smart peoples blog posts, before I finally got it working. Here’s how I (eventually!) did it:

First, install uShare. You can get it from the Ubuntu repos. As of writing, it’s at version 1.1a

Ok, now to configure uShare using sudo, so:

sudo gedit /etc/ushare.conf

You need to find the following entries, and make sure they look like this:

USHARE_PORT=49200
USHARE_DIR=/path/to/your/media
ENABLE_XBOX=yes

DANGER! DANGER! You must make sure there are no spaces in those entries (before, or after, the equals) and the ‘yes’ MUST be in lower case. No, I’m not kidding. I had ENABLE_XBOX as ‘YES’ and it just would not work until I changed it to ‘yes’. Also, complex names in the USHARE_DIR seems to make it show ‘No videos found’. Rename the directory, or copy your files to another directory. It might be the use of a space that causes this, not sure.

Not sure if this is 100% necessary, but several posts in other blogs have said that the ENABLE_XBOX option is a bit sporadic, so it’s best to hardwire uShare to force an Xbox compatible startup. So we need to edit another uShare file:

sudo gedit /etc/init.d/ushare

…and add this line at the beginning of the script (I put it after the comments):

USHARE_OPTIONS=-x

My PC has several eth options, I use eth1 for my original Xbox, so didn’t want to tinker with it, eth4 is for my router, so that left eth3. So to bring up eth3 (in my case):

sudo ifconfig eth3 192.168.3.1

Now we need to restart uShare using the init script:

sudo invoke-rc.d ushare restart

NOTE: do above command twice, I know it seems crazy, but the second time I run that command it gives  me a warning, but it works fine. If I run the command only once, the 360 can’t connect to my PC. Might just be a quirk on my PC.

Also do the above init to refresh your file listing. You can enable the web interface if you want to refresh files, but the init command works just as good. Remember to run it twice though!

OK you’re done.

Turn on your Xbox 360, go to My Xbox, across to the Video Library, and click. You should, in the next screen, see ‘ushare’ at the bottom of the list. Click it, and it should connect to your share directory. Voila! If you have mp3’s in your share dir, then come out of the video library and go in to the music library, they are all using the one share directory.

Playing AVI/DivX/XviD seems to be a bit of a problem. But one poster on the internet came with the simplistic solution of just renaming .AVI files to .WMV. Works like a charm!

NOTE: The above might work even if you have a PS3 as there are no changes made on the 360, only in installing uShare and configuring it in Ubuntu.