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Xbox 360 Media Sharing: Ushare and Fuppes

So you’ve converted a bunch of mkvs to mp4s via the guide on this site or you have a boatload of xvids dying to be seen on that lcd tv of yours. We could either put that dvd burner to work…or give it the night off and leave them right where they are on that 750 gig external. Trust me, your girlfriend is 4 times as sick as you are of watching “l33t scene rlsz” on your 19in laptop screen.

Note
This should also work for the Playstation 3 with a little tweaking, but alas, I do not own one to mess around with.

What We Need
First things first: in order for this to work, we need both your computer and Xbox 360 living together on the same network. Many people already have this setup (e.g. modem plugged into a router, computer(s) and 360 plugged into router). If you don’t have things setup like this already, either fire up that dvd burner or purchase yourself a router and some patch cable.

Media Sharing
The whole idea behind this is that your computer acts as a media server on your LAN, sharing the files you configure it to, and your 360 plays the stream (in my experience, it does this flawlessly). This is great for a whole bunch of reasons. Microsoft has built this serving functionality in some which-woo version of it’s bloated Windows Media Player, so us Linux users have created our own apps for getting this done.

Ushare vs Fuppes
Both Ushare and Fuppes will stream files to your 360 on the Linux side of things. They do, however, have some differences. Ushare is more bit more straight-forward in its use and configuration, but it does not automatically transcode media on the fly. This means that all the media you wish to stream has to be within the 360’s sorta strict playback specification (see this faq). It also seems to have a nasty bug in streaming large files (playback will stop with an error at around the 2gb mark, even though the 360 supports streaming files up to 4gb). Fuppes on the other hand, while being slightly more complicated to setup and use, will transcode video into an Xbox 360 playable format on-the-fly (although I haven’t really used it for this) and handles >2gb files fine. Personally, I tend to use Ushare for smaller xvid sharing (~350mb tv eps) and Fuppes for my mkv to mp4 conversions (they tend to be around 2.2gb per half). I should probably use Fuppes for both, but I guess I’m just strange like that.

Ushare
Installing Ushare is a breeze. On Ubuntu Hardy, it can be found in the repos, so a:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install ushare

will get you setup. On Gutsy, the Ushare site provides us with a nice .deb here. To ensure that Ushare didn’t add itself as a startup service, issue:

sudo update-rc.d -f ushare remove

To get Ushare up and running, go for a:

ushare -p 49153 -x -c /path/to/your/media

Fuppes
Fuppes can also be installed via deb: Gutsy | Hardy. I like making sure that fuppes didn’t go the service route either:

sudo update-rc.d -f fuppes remove

Next, we need to do a little bit more config before our first run:

cd ~
mkdir .fuppes
cd .fuppes
wget http://linuxlove.info/files/fuppes.cfg
wget http://linuxlove.info/files/vfolder.cfg

Now, the only thing left to do is to edit the top of your fuppes.cfg using your favorite text editor to include the directories you’d like to share. Once that’s all setup, run Fuppes by typing:

fuppes

In a terminal. This will start up the app and drop you at an interactive prompt (it’d be nice if it told you that, wouldn’t it?). Type r <enter> to build your media database and then v <enter> to refresh your vfolder listing. I’m sure there is a way to do this automatically at startup, but I take the lazy route and do it manually every time.

Whichever route you go, your 360 should detect either fuppes or ushare as a “computer” in the media tab of the dashboard. Yippee!

Save Some Disk Space
At the top of my fuppes.cfg, you’ll notice that I have my dvd drive shared. This is because I like to burn my mkv2mp4 conversions to dvd and then stream them from my computer’s dvd-rom drive (using speedcontrol to quiet the bugger down). This takes the stress of frequent movie watching off the 360’s drive, which is always a good thing. We all know how great the 360 is at failing on its own ;].