(2014-02-09, 06:14)SpinX Wrote: Hey guys i have a small guest house and would like to run a video on demand system to all the rooms along with a news channel.. would XBMC work for me if I host it on a server and network the Smart TV Box XBMC Media Player in the rooms.. I'm very new to XBMC and I'm really excited but need some advice and direction..
I think XBMC would work fantastically for this situation. XBMC is used by a company called at-visions who does something similar, but on a much larger scale in a number of hotels in Europe. It would be a very different setup in your situation, but in a good way as it will be a far simpler setup.
The on-demand video part should be the easiest. I assume we're talking about normal video files on a server that any of the rooms will be able to play. I'd setup this video library on a single XBMC instance just to see how it looks and make any needed tweaks, to make sure XBMC adds all the video files correctly to the library. Take a look at these pages:
Video library (wiki) and
Adding videos to the library (wiki). Once things are setup the way you want, you can
export (wiki) the library as NFO files, so that when each XBMC box scans the library, they are scanning in identical information, and will include any tweaks you have done.
Next up is your streaming news channel. For that it really depends on where this video is coming from. If it's a live TV source that needs a tuner, or if it is an internet stream, etc. Heck, depending on your situation, it might not be hard to allow each room/box to access live TV from other-the-air signals, cable, or satellite. Can you elaborate on the source of the live TV and what you'd like to see happen there?
Once the boxes are setup how you want, you'll probably want to lock the settings down using the
master lock (wiki) and maybe a custom
skin (wiki) that has a "kiosk" mode for additional locking. This is mostly to prevent accidental changes and keep everything running smoothly, even if the user has never used XBMC before. Additional settings can be made to turn off XBMC features like keeping track of what videos are watched/unwatched, since a guest house will be shared by many people, so it wouldn't make sense to keep track of those things. Unused features can be hidden from view. Just about everything in the interface can be customized.
Then you will want to select the hardware, the boxes XBMC will run on that will be in each room. I mention this last because regardless of what hardware you buy, the setup should be more or less the same for any of them, even if it's an entirely different OS or hardware type.