Medium Scale XBMC Deployment
#1
Question 
First off let me say that XBMC is the most awesome media solution I have experienced. I have been a user since Eden and all I can say is "Way to go developers!"

I am active duty military and I am trying to work up a proposal for my command. I need to have a draft design including a network map, sorce of supply, and most importantly cost. I am pretty good with home networking, however this idea is over my level of network design. I would like to have a centralized server with lots of storage, and a way to get that media to the hosts reliably and quickly. I plan to use some sort of database server to integrate all of the hosts for watched status. I would like to serve full quality blu-ray movies to a total of 25+ hosts.

The physical layout isn't that complicated. I have three decks to which i would like to distribute the media.
first deck i need 4 hosts with expansion to 10 hosts
second deck I need 5 hosts with expansion to 11 hosts
third deck i need 3 hosts with expansion to 5
The server would live on a deck all by it's self.

For you network engineers out there how would you create this topology?
Pointers? Fiber backbone?

For you hardware engineers what would you use for a host?
must be low maintenance and high reliablility

For you software engineers what os would you use?
would like to make an image on DVD for ease of deployability, also high reliability

For the general gurus, there will be no internet connection can XBMC be run this way? (my installations do not work without internet, xbmc freezes and must be terminated with task manager)

I hope this wasn't too long winded but as I said before I am pretty good at this stuff but I have never built a system on this level of complexity before.
Thanks in advance
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#2
Any one have any suggestions?
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#3
I can't help very much, but I can't wait to see what you come up with. Sounds like a great project. I would offer a couple of thoughts:
1) I think you need to pay careful attention to the expected number of concurrent users (how many of the 25 hosts would be streaming at the same time) and the bitrate of the media. That will tell you the total bitrate that you need to plan for, which will be critical to your network and storage design. Maybe standard hardware will do the trick depending on how the math works out.
2) If you have a relatively static library (not adding new content), then I think you could still have a rich XBMC experience even without the internet provided you square away all the metadata and cover art/etc prior to going offline. You could pre-populate the cached artwork to your client image DVD, which would be an easy way to improve library navigation performance out of the box.
3) Assuming by "hosts" you mean "XBMC clients" then I'd probably consider the NUC for hardware. Not sure what your budget is, but these are small and relatively cheap and quite flexible.

Good luck!
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#4
I think the biggest issue you will have with Command will be the legalities issues depending which country you are from/in.

Cracking DRM to rip is illegal in some countries
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#5
Good points,

as far as bandwidth is concerned i will assume that all 25 clients will be accessing the highest bit rate videos we plan to have. I have calculated I will need a total throughput of 115.625MB/s (bytes not bits) and 4.625MB/s for each client. With this I will opt for dual gigabit connections in aggregated mode between the media server and the main switch. From the Main switch i just mentioned, I decided on a single gigabit connection to each distribution switch located on each "deck". Each distribution switch will be connected to each XBMC client via 100BASET or better connection. Two points I have not worked out yet are:
1. A storage solution capable of the 115+ throughput requirement (RAID speeds)
2. acctual hardware required for switches and server. (Cisco?)
Suggestions?

as far as the legalities are concerned I am in the US so I should probably look that up and be prepaired to explain such constraints. Do you have any links in particular for something like this?

As far as the lack of internet connectivity, I plan to only add content while inport and maintain a folder with nfo and images on the server which is how i have it set up at home and it seems to work very well. I plan to use media elch at home to collect this data

"edited to add more"
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#6
Any more suggestions? I would like to keep this thread going as I plan and build this application of an awesome media center.
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#7
You need internet on XBMC to update metadata. I don't know how you can get it to work as XBMC gets info from the internet for the files so that metadata shows up.
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#8
Couple more comments:
1) Standard HDD's can read at over 150MB/s, which should provide enough throughput for your requirements (in theory anyway).
2) Since your storage data is unchanging for everything except the MySQL database, I'd consider avoiding RAID and instead just go to sea with a complete duplicate set of drives (to use in case of failure), and then find a lightweight backup solution for your MySQL DB which should be easy enough.

I'm just trying to keep this simple. I don't personally have anything against RAID, but I'm not sue it's necessary here since the data itself is pretty much static. I've also heard good things about unRAID, if that's the kind of thing you're intent on.

Alternately, you could have a separate storage server for each deck (each with the whole set of media), which would provide a triplicate solution and it would keep the storage and networking a little lighter weight. It should require no more than 50MB/s per deck, which should give you breathing room with standard HDDs and gigabit networking. The added bonus is that in case of a storage failure on one of the decks, you could point those hosts to one of the other two decks. Preserving watched status would be tricky in case of a failover like this, but it seems that it should be possible.

(2014-04-22, 01:40)tential Wrote: You need internet on XBMC to update metadata. I don't know how you can get it to work as XBMC gets info from the internet for the files so that metadata shows up.

See the last couple of sentences in post #5. Should work fine.
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#9
I was thinking of using the rs2414+ from synology. This would allow for several fault tolerance features. You do have an interesting point about separating the network into 3 decks. One feature I would like to keep however is to use remote admin to repair any config from any other drop or redirect the config files to a centralized location for a one stop shot to config all clients with one advanced settings xml I like the idea but I think there would be too many benefits with an all inclusive network
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#10
There seem to be some scripts that run during xbmc launch that require internet access. At home if internet goes down xbmc will fail to load and require an end task in windows. This is probably some setting I have overlooked. I should be able to look at logs and figure it out but I just havent applied any time to it. I was hoping someone would pipe up with their own install being a working example of an internetless configuration.
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#11
For shits and giggles just now I exited XBMC, pulled the WAN jack out of my router, verified that I didn't have internet (on any computers), and then started XBMC again. It had no problem starting and I could navigate the menu, etc. This was Frodo (12.3) on Windows.

Makes me wonder if it may be related to the "update library on startup" setting, or maybe some add-in that's giving you trouble.
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#12
That's exactly what I was talking about. I think something happens during startup that does not play nicely without internet. I installed xbmc on my android tablet and with a fresh install an all stock settings it force closed. I didn't even set up any sources so I'll have to spend more time with it when the kids arnt watching cartoons. I now know that its possible so thank you for the quick test. Now I won't worry so much about that issue and concentrate on developing a solid network and media server into my proposal.
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#13
For a system like this would you use a synology like NAS or would you go for a full fledg server? I only really need to provide up to 115MB/s for all connections. I see that this is under what synology specs the rs2414+ at. I use a synology raid at home and it works very well but i don't have 25 xbmc clients connected either. What do you suggest??
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#14
Frankly, I would consider the Synology to be a full fledged server and the specs of this model seem to fit perfectly with your XBMC requirements, including link aggregation and a read throughput spec that's triple your "worst case scenario" load. Seems pretty safe IMO. I believe the Synology OS runs MySQL as well, which should support your centralized XBMC architecture.

I suppose it would be good to think about other requirements that you might have for the server. For example, do you want the server to be capable of automatically provisioning/updating/installing software to the clients? That is out of my league, but with 25 clients it might be worth thinking about. Are there other applications that you want to be running on the server? Media organizers, transcoding streamers, etc?

Seems like a great project. I'd love to see a writeup once it's been deployed!
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#15
Like i said before i run synology and for media streaming it is awesome. It does run MySQL and that is why I thought it would be a good fit. The specs say that it is pretty fast, but i haven't done any link aggregation before mainly because i don't own the equipment required. The only thing that concerns me is the slow processer but I am not sure i need anything super fast. I like your idea of pushing out system updates through the raid but again I am not aware if that functionality exhists on synology DSM. I will have to do some digging for that one.

The onlything im still unsure of is what i should do about switches and distribution. As i mentioned before i am thinking i should have the server connect to a main switch which has aggregation and then distribute that two three other switches that don't have aggregation. I have determined that each of the 3 distribution switches only need a 1gb uplink connection to sustain full quality streaming to each of its XBMC clients. Am I going about this network design all wrong? Suggestions on make/model switch I should be looking at? I am trying to eliminate bottle necks and maintain high reliability without spending a ton of money on network redundancy.
What do you think?
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