Xbox 360 and miniDLNA

by ⋅ 6 Comments

miniDNLA configSince my PC blew up – and took Windows with it – I’ve been gradually making the switch to using Linux as my everyday desktop operating system.  Although I’ve been using it on my laptops and netbooks for years, I’ve usually kept Windows on the desktop for one simple reason: TVersity.

TVersity is an excellent UPnP media server which works perfectly with my media playback devices – the PS3, the Xbox 360, and the Roku SoundBridge in the bedroom.  Sadly, it’s Windows only – and most of the Linux equivalents have left me cold.

I stumbled across a small daemon called miniDLNA, written by a Netgear engineer for the company’s ReadyNAS range of network attached storage devices, which works like a charm as a TVersity replacement, with one exception – the damn thing refuses to be seen by the Xbox 360.  Thankfully, I’ve figured out why.

In the configuration file – /etc/minidlna.conf – the software makes reference to a “presentation URL,” which by default is commented out.  This results in an invalid default of http://192.168.0.1:80/, which everything except the Xbox 360 happily ignores.  The 360, however, decides to go visit this URL – and falls over.

To fix the issue, simply change the line to the IP address of your server and the port you’ve got miniDLNA working on – 8200 by default.  The entire line should end up reading:

# default presentation url is http address on port 80
presentation_url=http://192.168.0.20:8200/

Once that’s done, restart miniDLNA and everything should spring into life.

Posted in: linux ⋅ Tagged: ,

6 thoughts on “Xbox 360 and miniDLNA”

  1. test on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 17:20 said:

    Thanks, this just saved me a whole lot of head and heartache 🙂

  2. Matt on Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 15:22 said:

    Thanks for this. Been looking for a decent linux replacement for Tversity for a while.

    Whilst I haven’t tried it yet fuppes looks promising too.

    http://fuppes.ulrich-voelkel.de/

  3. Mahendra on Friday, January 14, 2011 at 20:49 said:

    Hello,

    I have set up the miniDLNA server on my Linux Fedora machine. I am running it on 8200 and my local network ip is 192.168.1.249.

    Even though after setting the presentation url to “http://192.168.1.249:8200”, I get the standard 404 error when I access the same url.

    Do you have any idea about the presentation url?

    Thanks in advance.

  4. Bnlopes on Sunday, September 18, 2011 at 16:00 said:

    Thanks a lot man. I`ve just changed my minidlna config on my NAS (Dealextreme NAS 652) and now I can stream from my external harddisk to my xbox without need of the pc. Great, that’`s all i wanted!

  5. medwards on Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 23:55 said:

    Thanks for posting this. It worked successfully for me, but unfortunately I was testing against my current IP and since then I’ve swapped in an new router and DHCP leased a new, different IP.

    I updated my dlna conf file to get it working until I could get a nice hostname assigned but it appears the Xbox won’t refresh its presentation url (or, *shudder* the IP that the dlna device runs off). Any ideas on how to force it to refresh short of system reset?

  6. Pingback: CentOS 6.2 and miniDLNA « Computer stuff

Leave a Reply

Post navigation