xbox360 and WMP11 fail

After about two years of procrastination, I finally got an xbox360 to fulfil my Burnout gaming needs. Before I got the (MW2) bundle, I installed Windows Media Player 11 (using the validation bypass trick). Now sitting here relieved that I finally got media sharing to work, I thought I'd blog about the one simple thing wrong with media sharing:

1. UNC network paths.

It took almost 2 weeks to find an answer to why my library was not showing up on the xbox360 and the answer lies here.

In summary (for those that don't want to follow that URL for some reason):

"If you want to share files that are not located locally on your machine, Microsoft has chosen to prevent you from sharing content located on network locations (UNC paths) like \\MACHINENAME\sharename"

Luckilly there is an undocumented registry "hack" that will fix this:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences\HME]
“EnableRemoteContentSharing”=dword:00000001

Huge thanks go out to GibStorm for documenting this so well...

HOWTO: Encode single-file (CD) to FLAC with embeded CUE sheet

I finally remembered how to do it (hence the reason for bloging about it)

This is intended as a rough guide on how to do it manually (I am still looking into automating this process with abcde):

1. Rip the audio CD as RW_RAW using cdrdao or some other program that can generate a compatible cuesheet and/or tocfile. I used the following command to do this (For more information on command syntax please read the cdrdao man page):

   
   cdrdao read-cd -v 3 --device=x,y,z --driver generic-mmc \
   --read-raw --read-subchan rw_raw --datafile image.bin \
   image.toc

   
   
2. Convert your tocfile that was created in the previous step to a cuesheet (cdrdao comes with program 'toc2cue' that can generate a very simple cuesheet). If you already have a cuesheet, then move onto the next step.
   
   
3. Encode the raw image. I used the following commandline to encode mine.
   

   flac --cuesheet=image.cue -8 image.bin --endian=big \
   --channels=2 --sign=signed --sample-rate=44100 --bps=16

   
   NOTE: The --sign and --endian options may differ for you (especially if you use PPC or something like that).
   

NOTES: the --ogg option doesn't seem to work when using the --cusheet option and flac exits with the following error (this will probably happen to you if you try to use that option as well):

image.bin: 100% complete, ratio=0.895
image.bin: ERROR during encoding
           state = FLAC__STREAM_ENCODER_OGG_ERROR

I have included my command-line usage for reference purposes only! So, don't come crying to me if you just copied and pasted those commands at it doesn't work!