NeToU

Beware the giggle loop!

Having recently switched to Ubuntu as my main OS (mainly for aesthetics and speed issues) I have been making steady progress at making sure I can still accomplish all the tasks my Windows XP machine use to do.

Apart from browsing and downloading the only other thing I use my PC for regualarly is to share out media to my Xbox360 so I can watch videos in my living room and play my own music while gaming.

A quick search showed me that uShare and FUPPES seemed to be the main contenders to provide media, I tested both and in my opinion uShare was by far the easiest to get running as my 360 refused to see FUPPES on the network.

While uShare’s video support worked like a dream; music support for the 360 just wouldn’t work, whenever I tried to view music files I was just presented with the first 50 video files (and folders) and no audio would play. So I did the only thing any developer can do when they have access to the source code for software that isn’t working for them; try to fix it myself.

After a day or so worth of work (of which the large majority was understanding the code and figuring out how to debug well in Linux) I have finally gotten uShare and my 360 to play nice when it comes to music.

As an added bonus I have sorted out another issue that was affecting my 360 too: multiple content directories can now be used correctly rather than the 360 only having access to the media in the first directory.

uShare_NeToU Summary:

• Users can view, select and play their music files through the Xbox 360
• The “Play All” feature should be working correctly also
• Multiple Content directories now supported (added in ushare.conf or on the command line with the -c argument) If you have videos/music files scattered around your PC (eg, accross multiple drives) you can now access all of them from the 360.

Notes:

• There is still no metadata support within uShare so music will not be sorted by album/artist etc
• When I was testing this out I noticed a bug that restricts the user from browsing uShares media while a file was being played, I have yet to look into this however stopping the file will restore functionality.

Download:

NOTE: If someone could tell me how to create install packages for the various architectures I will happily provide them here too

Source Code: uShare 1.1a - NeToU

This has only been tested on my Xbox 360 so any comments on its usefulness would be very welcome.

The demo for the Shader Factory is now available here : Shader Factory Demo

Alternatively just click the link on the navigation bar over yonder–>

Also, check out Kris Athi’s Virus Hunter game which was written using XNA too: Virus Hunter

NeToU