Patched uShare 1.1a : Additional Xbox360 Support
Written by NeToU on Saturday, 10 of May , 2008 at 1:45 pm
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.
Category: Development, Linux, Portfolio
Comment by Alex
Made Thursday, 29 of May , 2008 at 2:13 pm
Hi and thanks for your efforts on this!
I’m quite in the same situation as you are right now and the way you improved ushare is very important for me.
Do you have any insights over your patch being applied to ushare ?
PS: I’m coming from there:
http://www.geexbox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9804&highlight=xbox
Best regards !
Comment by NeToU
Made Thursday, 29 of May , 2008 at 3:22 pm
Hey there,
Thanks for the comment!
I’m a little confused. What is it you want to know?
How to use the patched version? Or how to apply a patch to the official version?
NeToU
Comment by Alex
Made Thursday, 29 of May , 2008 at 3:27 pm
Hi again!
I’ll guess I just need to compile your version to make it work, but I wanted to know if your modifications are going to be applied to the mainstream uShare in the near future.
Alex
Comment by NeToU
Made Thursday, 29 of May , 2008 at 3:33 pm
You would have to ask the guys at GeeXboX about that, it isn’t anything I’m involved in.
I made the patch was posted on their forums but I haven’t heard anything since so it’s all up the them.
Comment by Dru
Made Monday, 13 of October , 2008 at 10:02 am
Hi,
Great patch. Was wondering if you had any input on the issue where this daemon will not start at boot. I have tried numerous things and still no luck. Googling show that others are having this issue but i have yet to find a resolution. It’s quite annoying!
Comment by Andrew Weatherspoon
Made Tuesday, 2 of December , 2008 at 12:21 am
Is there any way that you could make ushare work with the libavcodec-unstripped-51 dependency? Currently, if anyone has WinFF or any other audio-video transcoding program installed, the codecs are wiped out because ushare only works with libavcodec51. Ushare works great, but I’d like to be able to transcode on the same linux machine that Ushare is on.
Comment by NeToU
Made Tuesday, 2 of December , 2008 at 12:47 am
Andy,
Either ushare development has stopped or the author is working on a new version as my patched version was never integrated into the main trunk.
Since it isn’t going anywhere at the minute I have been working on my own media server for my 360 to run in ubuntu and will be making an initial alpha/beta release in the next couple of weeks.
Are you looking for the media server to be transcoding or just removing the dependency so you can have the other codecs again?
I don’t see myself making a contribution to ushare again until it’s clear what the author is doing with it.
Comment by Andrew Weatherspoon
Made Tuesday, 2 of December , 2008 at 6:08 am
At the moment, I’d like to remove the dependency on the stripped codecs if that’s possible. When I do a build dep for the source, the new codecs are replaced with the stripped ones.
Comment by Swordphsh
Made Friday, 19 of December , 2008 at 6:31 am
First, I’m so glad someone finally fixed up this program a little. Thanks a lot.
Second, I have a few suggestions, if you’re up for them:
I’d like to see a way to restart the server remotely, either through the webui or telnet(which is useless); the webui converts spaces to + symbols when adding shares, there is no way to add shares this way which contain spaces in the path; the init.d script file does not seem to start the program anymore after updating to your version; and as mentioned above, the program will not start up with ubuntu.
Thanks again.
Comment by Swordphsh
Made Friday, 19 of December , 2008 at 6:55 am
Me again, the problem with the init.d script seems to be that the original ushare binary automatically loaded the config file if one existed, in your version it needs to be specified.
Hope that helps a bit.
Comment by Swordphsh
Made Friday, 19 of December , 2008 at 7:03 am
Sorry to spam your comments, but if you add “–cfg=$CONFIGFILE” to the end of line 57 in the init.d script, it will fix the problem and allow the script to start the daemon.
Comment by jrebeiro
Made Tuesday, 13 of January , 2009 at 6:02 pm
I just installed your patched version to try to solve an issue but it didn’t fix it.
I am using the NXE and I have ushare configured to share the following paths:
/usr/local/media/Videos
/usr/local/media/Music
/usr/local/media/Photos
The only thing that works properly is Videos. Music and Photos show me all the contents of the Videos directory. I am running ushare as root as a daemon with the -x and –cfg=$CONFIGDIR arguments.
I’m kinda baffled at this point and really miss TVersity 
Comment by otkaz
Made Friday, 6 of February , 2009 at 12:03 am
Hi thanks for this much needed patched ver!
I’m having trouble getting it to load on ubuntu 8.10
otkaz@otkaz-lappy:~/src/ushare-1.1a-NeToU$ sudo apt-get build-dep ushare[sudo] password for otkaz:
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
E: Unable to find a source package for ushare
otkaz@otkaz-lappy:~/src/ushare-1.1a-NeToU$ ./configure –prefix=/ –bindir=/usr/bin –mandir=/usr/share/man
Checking for compiler available…
Checking for locales …
Checking for ifaddrs …
Checking for langinfo …
Checking for iconv …
Checking for libixml …
Error, can’t find libixml !
See file “config.log” produced by configure for more details.
any suggestions?
Comment by NeToU
Made Friday, 6 of February , 2009 at 7:03 am
otkaz:
libixml is part of libupnp so you need to make sure that is installed first:
sudo apt-get install libupnp3
I don’t have the build system up and running so I can’t check for sure, if it still doesn’t work you need to check that the symlinks were created for libixml and libupnp when the install was run.
To add the symlinks you need to change directory to /usr/lib
from in there do. See if a libixml.so and libupnp.so exist and if not do:
ln -s libixml.so.2 libixml.so
ln -s libupnp.so.3 libupnp.so
This is only a rough guess as I can’t test it myself right now
Comment by Sergey
Made Wednesday, 11 of February , 2009 at 8:40 am
I have a proble with avi files more than 1,5Gb. It does not play it.
Comment by George
Made Friday, 20 of February , 2009 at 9:08 pm
This looks promising, I plan on giving this a shot later. The lack of music on my xbox really bugs me, so Im quite excited about trying it out.
Just an FYI @ swordphsh & anyone else who may be interested; I currently update ushare via the web interface using curl. I have this set up to be run on a while loop with inotify-wait whenever the contents of my shared drive change. No idea if this is a particularly good way of doing this, but it works well for me.
Comment by George
Made Saturday, 21 of February , 2009 at 2:53 pm
Worked a charm. Nice job Netou, much kudos.
Comment by NeToU
Made Sunday, 22 of February , 2009 at 11:40 am
To one and all, with uShare development discontinued I’m now working on my own media server project for linux (which will support Music/Video on Xbox360 and PS3):
http://netou.co.uk/?p=40
NeToU
Comment by Brian
Made Monday, 2 of March , 2009 at 10:33 am
I would like to try and figure out how to package this for Debian. I am using Sidux and had to use the Ubuntu . debs for ushare and libdnla. I’ve got it to work but have the organization problem that you patched. Your source package will not configure on my system due to depencies. I am kind of new to linux, but am willing to learn with some help. I’ve read a little about making packages for debian and a nice patched .deb would make alot of people happy, including myself. If you have time, and can help please let me know. Thanks
Comment by NeToU
Made Monday, 2 of March , 2009 at 1:16 pm
Hey Brian,
Although my primary focus is working on the new media server I don’t mind trying to help out with this.
When I made my patch to ushare I was pretty new to linux too which is most likely why that patch doesn’t work for you 
Do you use Skype or MSN Messenger?
if you email david [at] netou.co.uk with a contact then we can go over it soemtime this week and see if we can get it working for you. As for making a .deb package feel free to do this. I probably won’t look into this myself until I have a release of the new media server
Comment by NullString
Made Wednesday, 18 of March , 2009 at 3:02 am
hey man,
what are the differences between a normal upnp client and the xbox 360?
I’m trying to make a upnp server compatible with the xbox 360 but I can’t find where the differences are.
Comment by stuart
Made Friday, 19 of June , 2009 at 8:12 pm
I can build your updated version of uShare into a debian package for distribution with Ubuntu 9.04
I’d also be willing to work with you packaging and design ideas of your new upnp server
Comment by Viablepanic
Made Monday, 10 of August , 2009 at 2:29 pm
Hi,
Just wanted to thank you for your efforts.
I was recently given a PPC notebook and thought it might do a good job of serving media to my xbox.
For anyone else who might be wondering, this patched version works like a charm under debain squezze on a G4 powerbook.
thanks yet again i hope your media server is going well.
Comment by patanok
Made Wednesday, 4 of November , 2009 at 9:50 pm
THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!! THANK YOU !!!
I have been trying to stream music and photos to the xbox360 for 2 weeks. You save me ! I test you patch, it works like a charm ! Great job ! I can’t wait to see your media server
Comment by Vladislav65
Made Tuesday, 23 of March , 2010 at 10:28 pm
Comment by Vladislav67
Made Wednesday, 24 of March , 2010 at 8:18 pm
Comment by pizzaboy
Made Saturday, 7 of August , 2010 at 11:58 am
I quote the first 9 lines by patanok 
Thank you sooooo much!
