Nullriver’s Connect360 is a fantastic little app that you can run on your Mac that will fool your XBox 360 into thinking its talking to a PC, allowing you to share your iTunes, iPhoto and video libraries with the 360 dashboard. The video transcoding is a little lossy, but for SD applications it works exactly as advertised. Well worth the $20 they’re asking.
According to the Connect360 Support website, you can’t use Connect360 on your Mac to connect to your XBox 360 if your network uses a Linksys WRT54g with homebrew firmware on it. They’re right — it doesn’t work.
The solution is pretty simple, however. Abstract the Mac and the XBox from the router using a good* network switch. The switch will allow the two devices to communicate (via broadcast) with each other without having to go through the router, and all will work as expected.
*Note: The Connect360 site also warns that some switches may cause a similar problem. I’m using a NetGear Gigabit Switch to accomplish this, and it works perfectly. YMMV.
Thanks for the info… will let me friends know.
I’m in the group of people who is lucky enough to have an early version WRT54G wireless router (running modded firmware) and an Apple iBook G4 and an XBOX 360. Just my luck the trio DOES NOT WORK as mentioned in the read me @ nullrivers site. Connect360 recognizes my iTunes, iPhoto, and movie directories but doesn’t see the XBOX 360 under discovered devices. Once, I got the music list to show up on the 360 but i couldn’t use any of the files or see them…My question is what does having modded firmware (DDWRTPSP by: AHMAN) have to do with connect360? Is anyone working to fix it because there are tons of gamers who run modded WRT’s. Also, is there any chance of this ever being fixxed because my modded XBOX 1 works just fine with XBMC my computers (XP,OSX) to stream music/video etc,. The whole point of getting the 360 was for the HDMI and full HI DEF experience but I guess not. M$ seems determined to keep us locked out of our devices that we paid for…What a surprise there… So, what should I do? Flashing my router firmware to default every time I want to stream a movie is not going to cut it. It could brick my WRT54G and I sure as heck don’t want that to happen. This is the best router I’ve ever owned by far. My question is….what is diferent about modded firmware and what can we do to trick connect360 into playing nice with the WRT??? Send me an email if you have a solution. I just want to stream my Xvids and my itunes library to my 360. Have a Mac and also a PC running XP. What are my options besides spending more money?
Try out the Tomato firmware for your WRT54G. I have almost the exact same set-up and switching to Tomato solved all my problems (plus some problems I didn’t know I had until I saw how feature-rich Tomato was!)
http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato
Hey Jonathan,
I’m having an issue with my Tomato router and connect360. When I set it to Router mode instead of Gateway mode (on http://192.168.1.1/advanced-routing.asp) it streams movies perfectly. Otherwise, it never connects. However, in Router mode, my net connection doesnt work. Any ideas?
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