360 Linux Lovin'

Don’t ask me what’s with the name, but FUPPES is the best 360 streaming option for Linux today. It handles MP3s better than x360mediaserve, since it caches file information in a database, and it also handles images and video. FUPPES is still a young project, so there aren’t any official stable releases or handy distribution packages, but you can follow these steps to install it from source code:

1) Install all the packages that FUPPES depends on to build. You’ll need GCC, of course, as well as a number of libraries (LAME, PCRE, SQLite, FAAC, FAAD, uuid, libxml, and libtag), other build tools (autoconf, automake, libtool), and a copy of Subversion to download the source code. On Ubuntu, this will install everything you need:



2) Use Subversion to grab the source code to FFmpeg, a media conversion library and tool, and then compile and install it. We’ll install it (and FUPPES) into a new ‘/usr/local/fuppes’ folder, so it doesn’t conflict with any other FFmpeg installations on your system:



3) Grab FUPPES, also using Subversion, and configure it, ready to build:



4) Check the output of the “configure” command, to ensure that video transcoding with FFmpeg has been enabled, and then complete the installation:



5) Add your FUPPES folder to your shell’s path, and the FFMPEG libraries to your library path, and then run FUPPES, entering the name of your network device if it asks for it:



Those ‘export’ commands only stay valid for the current terminal session, but you can make them persistent by adding them to the ‘.bash_profile’ file inside your home directory.

6) Quit FUPPES by hitting ‘q’ and then Enter. It should have created a ‘.fuppes’ folder in your home directory, and a ‘fuppes.cfg’ file inside that. Open that file in a text editor and make the following changes:

* Inside the tag, add tags pointing to a directory holding some of the files you want to share:

  /home/lsd/MP3s
  /home/lsd/Videos

As with x360mediaserve, pick folders with just a few files for now – you can go nuts with your entire collections once everything’s working.

* Find the ‘’ tag, and the ‘’ section with it. Delete the Xbox 360 device section, and replace it with the following:

  Xbox/2.0.\d+.\d+ UPnP/1.0 Xbox/2.0.\d+.\d+
  Xenon
  true
  
    %s %v : 1 : Windows Media Connect
    Windows Media Connect compatible (%s)
    2.0
  
  
    AUDIO_ITEM_MUSIC_TRACK
    IMAGE_ITEM_PHOTO
    
      VIDEO_ITEM
      video/avi
    
  

7) Copy the ‘vfolder.cfg’ file from the FUPPES source code folder in to your ~/.fuppes folder. This file defines how FUPPES maps the files in its database in to a directory structure – for instance, it arranges your MP3s in to Artist and Album categories. Find the Xbox 360 section, and enable it:

8) Run FUPPES again, and hit ‘r’ and Enter to rebuild the content database. When that finishes, hit ‘v’ and Enter to rebuild the virtual folder hierarchy.

9) Fire up your 360, open the Music or Video sections on the Media blade, and search for a computer to connect to. Select the FUPPES option from the list, and your files should appear.

If your 360 has the latest system software as of December 2007, you should find that most videos play just fine. This update added support for AVI files with MPEG-4 SP and ASP video (that includes XviD, and DivX as of 5.0), and MP3 or AC3 audio, which should cover about 95 per cent of downloaded or ripped videos.

You’ll probably still find some files that don’t work though, especially if you have some old DivX 3 files still kicking around, or files in formats like Matroska or Ogg. If you just have the odd file, the easiest fix is to convert those files to a supported format. FFmpeg is a great tool for the job – it can convert a file with a single command:

ffmpeg -i infile.avi -ab 128k -acodec libmp3lame -vcodec mpeg4 -b 800k outfile.avi

These options give you a file with MPEG-4 ASP video at 800kbit/s, and MP3 audio at 128kbit/s: fairly typical options for an AVI file. You can tweak the bitrates up or down to alter the trade-off between file size and quality. Alternately, try two-pass encoding: run FFmpeg once with a ‘-pass 1’ option added, and again with a ‘-pass 2’ added. This takes twice as long, but it can significantly improve the output quality.

If you have a lot of incompatible files, it might be easier to enable transcoding support in FUPPES. This uses the FFmpeg libraries to convert AVI files to WMV on-the-fly, so anything that FFmpeg can read – and it can read just about everything – will play on the 360. To enable transcoding, edit your ‘fuppes.cfg’ file again, and find the ‘’ section inside the Xbox 360 device section. Add these lines after the ‘mime_type’ line:

         
  ffmpeg
  wmv
  video/x-ms-wmv         
  wmv2
  wmav1
  4400000
  128000

Restart FUPPES and try playing an AVI file; you’ll see a bunch of debugging messages and a lot of CPU usage on the FUPPES terminal as it transcodes the file, but on the 360 it should just play as you’d expect. At the time of writing, you can’t seek within transcoded files, which can be annoying, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is supported by the time you read this.