Monthly Archive for August, 2009

Rip DVDs in Linux for your Xbox 360

Published on August 27, 2009 in DVD Ripping and Xbox 360. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

So I have found many posts out there where everyone can’t seem to find the “easy” or “user friendly” software that makes ripping DVD’s to your computer to stream to 360 via UPnP easy. Hopefully I have the solution that people want. I found that dumping the DVD stream with mplayer and using vlc to convert was the easiest method. I have also been playing with the formats and containers to encode with, and found the one that seems to look the best and still manage to save a little space.

First, simply put your DVD in the drive and use mplayer to dump the stream:

mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream

If you have an ISO image, then:

mplayer dvd:// -dvd-device DVD.ISO -dumpstream

You should now have “stream.dump” in the folder that your executed the command in.

Next, launch vlc, then click on the “Media” menu option, and select “Convert / Save”.

file-media-convert

Click “Browse” and select a location to save your file.  Save your file as a “.mov” file.

add

Before starting, you will want to create a profile so that you can repeat this easily.  Click the “New Profile” button which looks like a sheet of paper with a star on it. (last button in the Settings block)

convert

In the “Encapsulation” tab, select “MP4/MOV”.

encap

In the “Video codec” tab, check Video, Codec H-264, Bitrate 3200 kb/s, Frame Rate 35 fps.  (I am still tweaking these settings for best quality, so any help would be appreciated).

vcodec

In the “Audio codec” tab, check Audio, Codec MPEG 4 Audio (AAC), Bitrate 256 kb/s, Channels 2, Sample 48000.

acodec

After that, label your profile, save, and start your ripping.  My video files, on average, are about 1.5GB in size.

Any help on fps and bitrates would be appreciated, for me, file size isn’t as much of a problem, I want the best quality.

Xbox 360 Media UPnP Server with uShare

Published on August 27, 2009 in Media and Xbox 360. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

After a little work, I finally got my Xbox 360 to connect with my computer using uShare. uShare allows you to share music, movies and pictures to your Xbox via UPnP. For Gentoo/Funtoo users out there, it is a bit of a pain to get working. First, it isn’t in Gentoo’s official Portage, so you have to get the overlay, and add… for Funtoo users though, the version listed in Portage has problems with the init scripts, so it is better to get the Overlay anyway.

Overlay: http://bugs.gentoo.org/192561

Next, the config files; if you had an old version of uShare, ditch it, and all of it’s config files(/etc/ushare.conf).  I used the following config for /etc/conf.d/ushare … and make sure that you add ‘-c’ in front of the directories you plan on sharing, or uShare wont start up, and wont give you any proper error readout.

# Copyright 1999-2007 Gentoo Foundation
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2
# $Header: $

# User to run ushare daemon (if none, root will be used)
USHARE_USER=""

# UPNP Friendly Name:
USHARE_NAME="reaper"

# The interface to bind to:
USHARE_IFACE="eth0"

# A List of directories to share, each precieded by '-c':
USHARE_DIRS="-c /home/roberts/media"

# Misc. options, like:
#  -p $port        Use specific port to listen ($port)
#  -x, --xbox        Use XboX 360 compliant profile
#  -d, --dlna        Use DLNA compliant profile (PlayStation3 needs this)
#  -w, --no-web        Disable the control web page (enabled by default)
#  -t, --no-telnet    Disable the telnet control (enabled by default)
USHARE_OPTS="-x -p 49152"

After this, you should be good. Start uShare with ‘/etc/init.d/ushare start’, point your browser to YOUR.IP:49152/web/ushare.html , and you can add more directories to share there.

Overall, the web interface is really bare and has no automatic refresh option, so every time you add files to the share directories, you have to restart the service, or click the refresh button on the web interface, however, it works. The only downfall is that it doesn’t perform transcoding, so you have to make sure you encode your videos in the right format. (I am working on that now, because I can see all of the directories, but the files are the “wrong format”)

Another tip, when trying to connect from the Xbox, make sure that you are in the “Video Library”, “Music Library”, or “Picture Library” and not in the Windows Media Center section. UPnP does not substitute WMC.