There is no XBox 360 Open Source Media Plugin for Linux.  I found this out after hours of labors compiling and sorting of system development files on my CentOS 5.2 Server.

You can not, currently, share your library as you see fit with your XBox 360. This thing really is great for playing media and it allows you to kill your friends, and get really great titles played like, Halo 3. Needless to say HAWX is also a huge favorite and Quake 4, but I think my destruction power is best delt on a PC with that one.

This started with the words Open Source right? Why’s this guy salivating over titles. Heh, you said salivating.

I spent about four hours getting Adobe CS4 Suite, Office 2007, and the rest of a Profile setup on a customer’s computer.

Yeah, I like multitasking. It rocks.

While trying to compile MediaTomb. Which really is an amazing program. If you own a PS3. (We have mutiny in the ranks!)

Seriously to any of you PS3 owners out there, this thing is MADE for you. Your Linux library of media will be at your dual joystick fingertips in probable surround sound and hdmi none the less.

Guess that means trying to negotiate with uShare again – doesn’t share the library correctly, uses an older form of ffmpeg to run the transcoding, needs to distinctify between video, music, and library sections.

When building MediaTomb from scratch, it is especially difficult to read the how to written for Ubuntu and apply it to a CentOS system. The package names are completely different and honestly, I am running X64… it makes a huge difference and finding the programs being called or getting the source and compiling them is a chore.

My guess is that MediaTomb needs to check into the hack or patch that someone made for uShare and allows the XBox to know that it is a valid UPNP Media device on the network (probably a ping back or some other token that allows recognition).

One of the custom compiled code pieces is actually called TwoLame. Wows. They have LAME which you have to use when you get Audacity working on a computer and often on Linux systems. It is an Open Source MP3 format that allows for huge compression and decompression of audio streams that used to be 150 to 200 MBs and now are 4 and 5 MBs, and then the modern day iPod. TwoLame was necessary for MediaTomb to be able to play DVD content and transcode it into something the XBox 360 wants to understand.

This image is really because the server is running two different virtual oses while it runs, but as you can see, the weight on the server is minimal even still.  Soon I will benchmark the system a bit and post some results.  It is kind of like when your kid brings home a report card with A’s on it.  You just glow.

You see, the Xbox 360 wants WMV and WMA content or the real deal CD or DVD – over a network, it doesn’t care about anything unless a Windows Media Center 2003 or 2005 or Vista or someone else that has paid to use a codec to send data to the Xbox 360. Kind of Lame. Right?

Two Lame indeed.