How to Stream Media to a PS3 or Xbox 360 from Mac & Linux Computers

Oct 11, 2011 08:02 PM

One of the main reasons I was held back from fully switching over to Linux was the fact that media streaming is nearly impossible. You have two choices in Windows: either you use file sharing with Windows Media Player, or you can just use the Windows Media Center. But both of these softwares are not for Linux or Mac. Microsoft doesn't like to make open source software because they believe in making a profit, instead of allowing others to innovate it.

Now you can always run Windows Media Player through Wine, but that's not really a solution. Nor is running Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center through a virtual machine. Instead, we need a native solution to stream our media! Bad enough that we Linux users have to deal with a lack of Netflix (but I have ways around that one, too).

In this Null Byte we're going to use a cool piece of software by GeeXboX that can emulate the media streaming capabilities of Windows Media Player for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Download the Software

First download the free software from GeeXboX called Ushare, then use the following commands (the things in bold are the terminal commands).

cd ~/Downloads

Move it to a nice place to keep things organized with this command:

mv <ushare> /tmp

Move to your temp directory:

cd /tmp

Extract with:

tar -zxvf <ushare>

Compile & Install Ushare

Now we need to compile and install our Ushare package! This package installation is a bit different from usual packages because it uses a custom script at the end.

Change to the newly extracted directory:

cd <ushare>

Now time to configure it for compilation:

./configure

Next, compile the program:

sudo make

This is the part with the funny-business script:

sudo make install-strip

That's it!

Configure Ushare

By default, the media servers for Xbox 360 and PS3 are NOT enabled, so we will need to mess with Ushare's configuration file.

Open a terminal window and use the following command:

sudo nano /etc/ushare/ushare.conf

Go to the line that says, USHARE_ENABLE_XBOX= and after the = sign, type:

yes

Here is a quick video that I made to show you how to mess with some of the other options and configure which folders you want to share.

Now go enjoy streaming all that media to your devices from your Mac and Linux systems! Another reason to stop using Windows, brought to you by Null Byte.

Come chat with me and the friends on IRC and follow me on Twitter!

Image by Sam Spratt

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