[SirBC]

I have not used XBMC before but I will be setting it up on my ATV next weekend. I had a couple of questions though.

1. I will be streaming content from a SMB share to the ATV. I don’t currently have any 1080P content so I think the ATV will be fine for what I want to do, but in a year or so if I want to switch to, say, a windows HTPC, will I be able to somehow move all of the scraped info over the HTPC without having to re-catalogue everything?
   
2. I will have two ATV ‘s at two locations in the house. Do I need to catalogue the content at both ATV’s?
   

Thanks!
-Dave

[SirBC]

Bumpity.

[jmarshall]

The absolute best way to catalogue stuff is to create nfo files for each movie that contains all the information. This can be time consuming - there's a windows app out there to do it though.

The second best way is to use XBMC on one machine to create a database, and then export it + import it on the other machine. This assumes that the paths to the video files are the same on all clients. This will be true if you are serving the files from a remote machine over smb. You do an update on your client of choice, export the library to your remote server, and import on the clients.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[SirBC]

So it sounds like the database is stored locally but can be exported, which should work for me. Good to know. Knowing that I have two more questions.

1. I'd like to hear what others are using for a backup strategy. It would be painful to have everything cataloged just the way you want it only to loose it in the even of an HD crash. Do you have to manually backup the catalog or is there a way to have the catalog automatically backed up to a network share?

2. Has there be any thought of giving the user an option of either storing the catalog locally or on a network share? If I am understanding correctly the only way for those of us with more than one XBMC to keep the catalogs synced is to export/import every time something is added to the database. That could quickly become tedious. It would be nice if more than one XBMC could share a catalog in a client/server relationship.

-Dave

[ShortySco]

I can vouch for the nfo method mentioned by Jonathan.

The brilliant Windows app XBMC Media Companion can be found here.
Basically, the data for your movies are stored in a text file alongside the media files (Terminator.avi gets Terminator.nfo)
Benefits being that when you do an initial scan of your database, it takes under a minute (Previously i've waited hours to scan my databases) because it does not need any internet lookups, thumb's are taken care of in the same manner.

Also it means you'll never loose the data unless you also loose your media (like in a HDD crash, which happened to me twice in the last fortnight ) because they are stored together.

I now have a backup strategy (once bitten twice shy) to use an xcopy command in a batch file, which copys my whole directory stucture and all files, except the media itself, which works great and is nice, simple and fast. I guess you could even set windows scheduler to run it periodically.

Shorty

[SirBC]

Good stuff, thanks!