Win Dropbox Synching Thumbnails with MySQL DB
#1
I have a different solution to this issue which I thought I'd share.

I use a MySQL DB for my movies and music library, and I run three XBMC clients that all access this DB server. If a client is set to scan and update the library, it will download the thumbnails and update the DB. All other clients see the DB update, but not those local thumbnails. They actually generate their own thumbnails of random image pulls from the video, not the good ones you just downloaded. (Just restating the issue).

So, I put together a little Dropbox solution that fixes it all for me. I'm using Win7 on all clients, just fyi. I use a free Dropbox account and the sync application to keep all XBMC clients synched with the thumbnails. Just grab a gmail account and set a dedicated Dropbox account for this. It's free and easy.

For each client, I do the following:
(1) Install Dropbox Application for Win7 on each client. This app does auto-sync in the background on folders of your choosing, to a destination of your choosing.

(2) Set the destination of Dropbox to C:\Dropbox. You can make this what you want, but make it the same for all clients for consistency. You can't explicitly map the Dropbox sync to the userdata/thumbails folder, otherwise I would just do that. When you pick the destination folder, Dropbox automatically makes a "Dropbox" folder, then the synced folders go inside that. So this means your thumbnails live somewhere other than the default location.

(3) Use the path substitution XML code mentioned earlier (in the advancedsettings.xml) to re-map the thumbails to the Dropbox location

FROM: special://masterprofiles/thumbnails/
TO: C:\dropbox\thumbnails\

Done!

See, this way, the thumbnails are stored locally on your computer's drive, which makes it faster to load.
All clients running this configuration stay in sync.
And whenever a library update is called, the thumbnail changes and gets synced up to Dropbox, then down to all clients. The newest one wins, which can't be anything other than the one you scanned into the library.

This may seem like a bit of a sledgehammer approach, but once I set it up a while back, I actually forgot about it and everything has been pretty seamless since.
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Dropbox Synching Thumbnails with MySQL DB0