[ryanjk333]

Hi,

I've done a lot of searching in the forum, but haven't quite found what I'm looking for.

Basically, I have some SMB shares on my network, so
\TV Shows
\Movies
\Music

and they contain all the media I own. What I need to do is create 3 profiles in XBMC (which I've never done, but plan to try soon):
-Family
-Guests
-a main profile for myself

My profile will have all the media that I own in it, so that'll be easy - just scan the shares for everything and add it to the library.

However, the guest profile will have most of the media, but not all, and the family profile will only have a handful of my media in the library.

Unfortunately splitting the media into more separate shares just isn't an option. It's already spread over different servers, and making major file structure changes would require some RAID changes (long story).

So I'm wondering is there a way to either:
1. Filter out some of the media so that it doesn't get added to certain profiles. Or I thought about adding all the media to these profiles and then manually deleting out what I don't want, but then down the road when I add new stuff and have XBMC do a scan, isn't it going to just re-import everything I deleted back in? -OR-
2. Manually add media from the shares to certain profiles so that XBMC doesn't see the whole share. I even thought about creating a separate share that has Windows file shortcuts to the actual video files, but XBMC didn't read in the shortcuts as media files (it didn't even notice them at all).

Any ideas would be most appreciated! Thanks in advance!

[live4ever]

Movies would need to be in individual folders - then set content on each folder (movie or tv show) within guest profile with selected folder contains a single movie/tv show option checked.

[DarrenHill]

You could maybe do it with a selection of smart playlists, or perhaps add tags to each movie/show depending on who should have access to it and then filter things by those tags.

But it's going to be a lot of work either way around anyway, especially adding tags. Plus of course you'll have to remember when you add new stuff to add the relevant tag to it for Family and/or Guests or they won't see it at all (presuming your main account will just inhale everything regardless).

[un1versal]

Welcome to forums...

If you read wiki @ profiles (wiki) page you will see that each profile can have independent sources, just create each profile and dont copy sources from master profile and then add whatever sources you want to each profile and generate own libraries from that.

[Tight_wad]

How many movies and tv shows do you have? Also, how are you planning to split them up, meaning family is limit to what and same for quests?

[ryanjk333]

Thanks for the responses. The way I'm deciding to break down the profiles is somewhat by MPAA rating, but not exactly since some things don't have ratings and there'll always be exceptions where I'll need to separate things manually. So I'll have access to everything. Guests will have access to almost everything, but minus a few because I have friends/relatives who I'd like to let browse through the collection, but who wouldn't be too amused by my American Pie collection, etc. lol. And then family will be super restricted and contain only a small fraction of my movies that kids and their parents would find completely acceptable. I really wouldn't want people to somehow accidentally stumble into a different view in XBMC and find the whole collection or anything like that. So would a smart playlist give me that ability to specify exactly what I wanted in it and lock down a profile to only access the media listed on the one smart playlist. Or is the only way to do this to separate out all my content into separate shares and link the right profiles to the right shares (thus making a mess of my current file structure)?

[ryanjk333]

Well, I think I'm just going to have to change my file structure. The ability to use profiles in XBMC should do exactly what I need once I break down my media collection into SMB shares for each profile instead of having the content all mixed together and trying to find a way for XBMC to separate it all out. And this way I can be sure that there's no way each profile has access to content/shares they shouldn't be able to see.