[Polydwarf]

I've been using samba on my ubuntu server machine to share out video to my ATV2. But, I've read some posts that make me think that's not the best way to do it (mainly because of buffering due to protocol overhead, I think).

I'm on a local network, with no need to share out to the world (ie, security is not a concern). As noted, the serving machine is an ubuntu server, not a hardware nas, so I can pretty much do what I want.

So, the question is... If I'm going to switch from samba to something.. What's best? http? ftp? Don't switch at all? I've played with http, but it *seems* that library scans, at least, are much slower than samba; no idea about playback yet. But, blowing out my apache logs makes me a sad panda.

I'm on latest unofficial nightly (5/16/2011) if that matters.

[Polydwarf]

To reply to myself... I'm seeing in my apache logs a bunch of messages similar to:

Code:

[Sun May 29 09:16:38 2011] [error] [client 192.168.0.70] File does not exist: /var/www/theTV/Family Guy/Season 09/.actors

This is repeated multiple times per season per show, but isn't a nice multiple of the number of episodes in any given season (or files in the directory, or any other rhyme or reason I can think of).

I'm not sure what xbmc is doing, other than the obvious of looking for a file named ".actors" (actors are specified in my nfo files from sickbeard). Could it be doing something weird when it can't find a .actors file that causes library updates to be slow?


** edit **

Nevermind about this, I figured out what it's doing. Sickbeard creates the nfos as needed for shows with http links to the actors for the show to imdb, however some actors aren't listed in imdb (or thetvdb or wherever it gets info from). Consequently, you get a .nfo file for a show that might look like this for an actor:

Code:

<actor>
    <name>Amy Irving</name>
  </actor>

xbmc will look for a subdir named ".actors" for thumbnails for them in that situation (thanks apache for reporting invalid directory access as a file problem.. ugh)