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Does anyone know of any side effects if I were to use a third-party utility to synchronize the contents of the thumbnail cache across all three of my XBMC machines?
My database is on a SQL server, but to get updated thumbnails I end up having to refresh videos often. I think synchronizing the cache would help.
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As long as all you source's use the same drive letters and locations and the database files are identical, then it will work, but if your source's use different names and drive letters etc then the links in the database to the thumbs will be incorrect. just set your library's to background update or update on startup or even use the library update timer addon which updates at specific times as specified. (i.e. if you know you will be watching something between 9pm-9.30pm every evening, set it to update at 9.10pm. that way you'll never notice the update.
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All three of mine use a centrally stored MySQL database and the sources are SMB:// so they are the same.
Problem with a library update is this...
I add a new movie to a source location. I've already added fanart and the poster, etc. I do a database update on one XBMC box and it adds it and grabs the art and everything.
Since they all share a database, they now all have the movie in their library. However, the second and third don't have the poster, etc, unless I manually refresh the new movie on each of them.
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2010-10-12, 17:48
(This post was last modified: 2010-10-12, 17:50 by rudeboyx.)
then in that case, simply copying you thumbs as suggested should work with out issue. It may be worth backing up you thumb cashe's first so you can return to your current state if anything does go wrong.
i dont currently use the central network database feature yet, but doesn't that defeat the point if it doesn't create a central thumb database also as you would still need to update library on every instance of xbmc.
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It does offer some value... it centrally maintains a watched/unwatched state, and playcounts/ratings for music, and resume points. I can stop a movie in one room and resume from the same point in another.
The watched/unwatched information is very important to me, too, for television episodes.
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mwkurt
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thejack,
If I may make a suggestion..have you considered using symlinks to keep your thumbnails synced to each other?
I started out using one of the third party utilities and kept getting popups that I was using it too much, so I switched to using a symlink and it is just as good without all of the hassle of worrying about buying a program or updating, etc and is really easy to do.
Mark
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prae5
Team-XBMC Forum Moderator
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Have you considered mounting your thumbnails dir to a network source. Thats what i do with my machines and it works great.
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Mounting to a network source would be great, but I'm running it on Windows 7 and not sure how to mount a network source to a subdirectory.
Is there a way to tell my installation to store the thumbnail cache in a different location?
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Symlinks in Windows seems to have worked. Copied the Thumbnail cache to a network share and then created symlinks on each XBMC client that pointed to that location. Thanks.
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Speed is just fine. What I did (in Windows) was to go to the UserData folder and delete the "thumbnails" folder (you can make a copy of it to your shared folder in the central location first if you want, otherwise the thumbnails should just recreate).
You should have a shared location that the account running XBMC can access and write to from each of your XBMC installations.
from the command prompt (no way to do this in GUI) do "mklink /d Thumbnails \\server\share"
It will create what looks like a folder called "thumbnails" but it will actually be a link to the shared folder. It'll have a different folder icon in Windows. It should stay after each reboot.
It hasn't happened often, but just enough to be really annoying.
