Update: Please read all the comments before sending me a question! You can find my FreeNAS posts/Tutorials here:
- FreeNAS – switching back. About my decision to move back to FreeNAS from Windows Home Server.
- FreeNAS Tutorial for Windows Users – Part One – Installation – installing the FreeNAS server onto a PC.
- FreeNAS Tutorial for Windows Users – Part Two – Configuration – configuring FreeNAS and Windows File Sharing.
- FreeNAS Tutorial for Windows Users – Part Three – Upgrading – Upgrading your FreeNAS Server.
- Using Microsoft SyncToy 2 with FreeNAS – Automating your backups – for free.
- FreeNAS Tutorial for Windows Users – Part Five – XBOX 360 – Using FreeNAS with your XBOX 360 (this post)
- FreeNAS Tutorial for Windows Users – Part 6 – Adding another drive
Very quick one here – but since I get a lot of hits looking or this information, I thought I would post it. Enabling the XBOX 360 to see the FreeNAS server is very simple.
- On your FreeNAS admin page, select UPnP under Services.
- Click Enable on the UPnP page.
- Give it a name that you will recognize when browsing via the XBOX.
- Set the network interface (should be set if you only have one network card.
- Select the FreeNAS share you want the XOX 360 to use – in this case I am sharing my Movies folder with my XBOX – I could also add music, pictures, etc.
- I left the port blank to use the defaults.
- Under Profile just select XBOX 360.
- You can enable the Control web page or not.
- Click Save and Restart.
That’s it – on your XBOX 360 you should be able to go to the media blade, select Video, then browse for computers and see the FreeNAS server (you may have to press the blue “X” button on the XBOX remote to change the source of the movies, music, whatever. Below is the UPnP screen shot from my FreeNAS server.
How can it be made a secure user for accessing the FreeNAS UPNP web page, please?! Awaiting, please for your answer.
Hi, very new to freenas, running version: 0.7 Khasadar (revision 4919)
I tried to follow the instructions above to enable streaming to xbox 360, but when I tried to click on ‘save and restart’, I got an error:
The following input errors were detected:
* The attribute ‘Content’ is required.
* The attribute ‘Database directory’ is required.
I don’t know what to do with either of these. Should I just make a new directory for the database to be stored in? And I couldn’t type anything in the ‘Content’ field, and there was nothing to select. Thanks for any help! Cheers, Joe.
I’m having trouble with this…
uPNP on FreeNAS was working fine with PS3, now my housemate has moved out and taken the PS3.
We have been trying to get it to work on XBOX360… no luck, we can only see one movie… and NO music whatsoever… I changed the profile to DLNA and I can now see all my folders, the files had Xs next to them and would not play.
I tried “rebuild virtual container” and such, but nothing seams to work.
can anyone help?
-Dan
Hi,
I am planing to install a freeNAS on an old PC after finishing some upgrades. I hope you can help me in that. Please, send me you email add through which i can contact you, obviously I am unable to find it here.
Thanks.
I had a few problems with sharing, but rebuilding everything from the config page and adding the XBOX’s IP worked like a charm. My only problem now is that for some reason whenever I add an album it lists the album twice on my xbox.
Any ideas?
I would also like to thank Rob for the excellent guides.
I have everything working – FreeNAS, CIFS/SMB sharing, UPnP sharing, and my Xbox 360 sees the files. The problem is whenever I add new music,images,or videos to my FreeNAS the Xbox 360 doesnt see them. I manually update database and it still doesnt see them. I have to manually rebuild the virtual container in order for the Xbox 360 to see my new files.
Why does this not happen automatically? Before setting up FreeNAS, I was using Windows Media Player 11 on my WinXP machine to stream media to my Xbox 360. Whenever I added new media it showed up automatically on my Xbox 360. Is there a setting that preventing my FreeNAS from doing this automatically? I hate to go back to WMP11 on my WinXP machine because I wanted FreeNAS to free up resources on that machine.
You need to disable then re-enable upnp every time you add to the share
I’m running the latest build: 0.69.
Basically, this is what I did to get it to work.
1) Rename my UPnP to “freenas:xbox” (like previous posters have said, the colon is important)
2) Enable web user interface
3) Go to http://your_nas_ip:49152 –> options –> rebuild virtual container
I have CIFS/SMB enabled (does not affect UPnP).
Thanks for all the help.
Hi,
It’s good for me Peter with that name “freenas: seee” or another name complex.
To see my shared files I had to disable the CIFS / SMB service and my files are now visible.
For my part, I activated the AFP service because I use OSX and the UPnP service.
Hi Guy’s..OK having walked around a bit and calmed down..I joined the sourceforge.net forums and well here is a simple answer…If you name the server in the UPnP like this freenas: seee the colon makes a big difference it works, I rebuilt the database and container as well but now the the XBOX can see the share, but not the files or folder structure but I’m convinced that is more a permissions issue. Later Peter
Hi Dan, Been trying all day to get this working. Got the latest FreeNas build as of this week and can’t get the XBOX360 to even believe there is another box on the network to get files from. Tried your file edit and only got an error code 1 when trying to restart the UPnP service. I’ve given up. Its real poor to have the service and a drop down for the XBOX if it doesn’t work.
Excellent notes on the cron stuff! Added to update in the mornings, thanks for the info.
I tried to post the bit about the name but it didnt display correctly (a bit like my IP description), then I ran out of time – hence the blank post. Your link shows what I was trying to say nicely.
My post above on the IPs misses out the tags as they are not displayed when I submit the post but basically inside the allowed_ips section you have to add an ip tag (surrounded with greater than and less than bracket), your xbox ip address then a closing ip tag (less than, forward slash, greater than).
For me to get it working properly I needed both of the above amendments to the file. The only problem is when you add the IP address you can no longer use the fuppes web user interface from the freeNAS UPnP page so you cannot rebuild your containers or DB when you add new files. The way I have got round this is to create two files in the /etc/rc.d folder, one with the ip in and one without. I just switch them from the command line then restart the service from the freeNAS interface when I need to access the fuppes web interface to rebuild the DB. Once done I switch them back and restart again.
Interestingly enough, now I have removed the IP tag and left the friendly name bit in there and it all seems to be working i.e. I can see it from the 360 and edit it through the web interface :0)
By the way, while I am at it the only automated solution I can find to get fuppes to see new files that I put on the shares it to schedule nightly rebuilds of the database and container files. I have added the following to the cron (system|advanced|cron):
/etc/rc.d/fuppes rebuilddb
/etc/rc.d/fuppes rebuildvcont
I have experimented and it looks like you have to do both in order for the xbox to see the updates. I have spaced them out to run @ 3am and 5am so the first one has time to complete (each takes about 40 mins with my data).
http://pastebin.com/f7a641389
here is the code dan was speaking about in his last post.
this code goes in the xbox 360 description section.
I added allowed ips too, but if you don’t all ips are allowed.