[k1282]

Hi guys,
i was just wondering about how I could simplify my media life at home, as i have 1 problem and 1 wish:

Problem:
I have 2 streaming clients at home (a zotac zbox) which have windows and xbmc installed. both clients are connected via gigabit lan to my QNAP NAS System, which stores all my media files. Both XBMC Clients access my files on the NAS for streaming.
Now, what bothers me is the following: when watching a movie oder tv series episodes on client A (living room), i do not have the "watched" flag on client B (bedroom).

Here, i think a common share xbmc database would solve it, but can it be realized? or is there even another solution?

Wish:
my wish is related to my problem. it would be great if I play a movie on client A and resume it on client B (regardless, if i stop or pause the movie). is there a solution to that too?

would be happy to read about your thoughts.
best.
k

[TugboatBill]

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=80829

[tcman47]

Is it possible to have one library shared to 3 clients. I am adding fanart to all my music artists on the one client and the results are awesome but I don't want to do it all again on the other two clients, it is very labor intensive, is it possible?

Thanks
TC

[TugboatBill]

Follow the link. It tells all.

[tcman47]

I only care about sharing fanart and this method doesnt do it, I am manually downloading my own music fanart and putting it in the artist folders but it only shows up in the client I am working on and not the others.

I wish XBMC could become networkable across many clients, then it would absolutely be stunning.

As it stands now I am going to have to give up and inserting music fanart into my folders, it just doesnt network, oh well.

TC

[darkscout]

rsync.
path substitution

There are options.

[tboooe]

I only care about sharing fanart and this method doesnt do it, I am manually downloading my own music fanart and putting it in the artist folders but it only shows up in the client I am working on and not the others.

I wish XBMC could become networkable across many clients, then it would absolutely be stunning.

As it stands now I am going to have to give up and inserting music fanart into my folders, it just doesnt network, oh well.

TC

Yes, you can share the Thumbnails folder between all your clients. Move you Thumbnails folder to your desired location, delete or rename each local Thumbnails folder, then make a symbolic link to the central Thumbnails folder on each client.

Be warned though that speed may be an issue. I tried putting the Thumbs on my NAS and browsing my media was painfully slow. My nas is a bit underpowered by today's standard (Thecus N4100Pro). I then put it on my Zotax ND-22 box which helped with speed tremendously but the lag was still not acceptable from my wireless clients. I think for this to work all your clients need to hardwired to the network. I plan on buying a 5ghz usb wireless adapter to see if this will help with speed. Currently, I have a lot of older devices on my 2.4ghz network that does not support Wireless N so I am not getting the max speed.

[tcman47]

Yes, you can share the Thumbnails folder between all your clients. Move you Thumbnails folder to your desired location, delete or rename each local Thumbnails folder, then make a symbolic link to the central Thumbnails folder on each client.

Be warned though that speed may be an issue. I tried putting the Thumbs on my NAS and browsing my media was painfully slow. My nas is a bit underpowered by today's standard (Thecus N4100Pro). I then put it on my Zotax ND-22 box which helped with speed tremendously but the lag was still not acceptable from my wireless clients. I think for this to work all your clients need to hardwired to the network. I plan on buying a 5ghz usb wireless adapter to see if this will help with speed. Currently, I have a lot of older devices on my 2.4ghz network that does not support Wireless N so I am not getting the max speed.

My 3 computers are all hardwired together on a 1GB network, how do I make symbollic links to a central thumbnail directory?

[mwkurt]

Hello,


Did you try doing a search here for symbolic link?

Mark

[jhsrennie]

My 3 computers are all hardwired together on a 1GB network, how do I make symbollic links to a central thumbnail directory?

Code:

D:\temp>mklink /?
Creates a symbolic link.

MKLINK [[/D] | [/H] | [/J]] Link Target

        /D      Creates a directory symbolic link.  Default is a file
                symbolic link.
        /H      Creates a hard link instead of a symbolic link.
        /J      Creates a Directory Junction.
        Link    specifies the new symbolic link name.
        Target  specifies the path (relative or absolute) that the new link
                refers to.

I've never tried it but presumably you'd cd your way to %appdata%\xbmc\userdata, then delete the Thumbnails folder and use the command:

mklink /D Thumbnails \\mynas\sharename\somepath\Thumbnails

That will make the "directory" %appdata%\xbmc\userdata\Thumbnails actually point to the shared folder \\mynas\sharename\somepath\Thumbnails.

To delete the symlink just use rmdir as you would for a normal directory.

JR

[josz]

The above method might work (haven't tried it myself, so dunno) but I also have an auto it script to copy artwork to my clients from the main scraper client (the one that looks for new content, living HTPC).
It uses synctoy (windows only) to sync up the image files. It does it on an interval basis (I set it to 5 hours) and pings the source to see if it's accessible, if not it will try again in 5 minutes and so on, if it succeeds it wil wait for 5 hours and then try again.
Synctoy only replicates modified/new/deleted data so that saves some bandwidth.

If there's any interest in such a script I can make it more usable and share it here.

p.s.
linkshell extension is able to do previous post with an explorer shell extension. I always use that myself

[tboooe]

The above method might work (haven't tried it myself, so dunno) but I also have an auto it script to copy artwork to my clients from the main scraper client (the one that looks for new content, living HTPC).
It uses synctoy (windows only) to sync up the image files. It does it on an interval basis (I set it to 5 hours) and pings the source to see if it's accessible, if not it will try again in 5 minutes and so on, if it succeeds it wil wait for 5 hours and then try again.
Synctoy only replicates modified/new/deleted data so that saves some bandwidth.

If there's any interest in such a script I can make it more usable and share it here.

p.s.
linkshell extension is able to do previous post with an explorer shell extension. I always use that myself

Synctoy sounds interesting. Does it consume a lot of processor power? Do you run that on both PC's or just one that is the "source"?

[josz]

Synctoy requires a fair amount of resources (especially CPU power) I believe but I'm not certain, can get back on you with that (currently @ work).
However I find that no dealbreaker since it only uses these resources for a small amount of time, for me usually under 10 seconds or something (it only needs to do the check which are modified etc and then copy over say 3 images that were added).

Currently I have setup the script in a polling fashion. That means that the client (the one that does not have the new images yet) asks the server (the one that has the images) if there's anything new to copy, if so, then copy.
I could however set it up in a push fashion, which makes more sense in my situation, now I think about it The pushing method will work as followed;
The server will check if the client is online and if so will push the images to the client.

Either way works.
I will rewrite some of my scripting and include a config.ini file so you do not need to compile it yourself (and adjust the variables, that's how I've set things up for now, real quick dirty thing we're talking about here, at least for the moment).
However before I do that I will need to know if pushing or polling is the preferred strategy (I think pushing, one exe on one machine with one config file makes it a bit more maintainable).

p.s.
The script currently launches synctoycmd.exe with arguments. This does mean there's a command prompt popping up while synctoy's running. I can look into minimizing it etc but I do not believe I can make it disappear completely.

[TugboatBill]

Code:

D:\temp>mklink /?
Creates a symbolic link.

MKLINK [[/D] | [/H] | [/J]] Link Target

        /D      Creates a directory symbolic link.  Default is a file
                symbolic link.
        /H      Creates a hard link instead of a symbolic link.
        /J      Creates a Directory Junction.
        Link    specifies the new symbolic link name.
        Target  specifies the path (relative or absolute) that the new link
                refers to.

I've never tried it but presumably you'd cd your way to %appdata%\xbmc\userdata, then delete the Thumbnails folder and use the command:

mklink /D Thumbnails \\mynas\sharename\somepath\Thumbnails

That will make the "directory" %appdata%\xbmc\userdata\Thumbnails actually point to the shared folder \\mynas\sharename\somepath\Thumbnails.

To delete the symlink just use rmdir as you would for a normal directory.

JR

I use this and it works!

[tboooe]

Synctoy requires a fair amount of resources (especially CPU power) I believe but I'm not certain, can get back on you with that (currently @ work).
However I find that no dealbreaker since it only uses these resources for a small amount of time, for me usually under 10 seconds or something (it only needs to do the check which are modified etc and then copy over say 3 images that were added).

Currently I have setup the script in a polling fashion. That means that the client (the one that does not have the new images yet) asks the server (the one that has the images) if there's anything new to copy, if so, then copy.
I could however set it up in a push fashion, which makes more sense in my situation, now I think about it The pushing method will work as followed;
The server will check if the client is online and if so will push the images to the client.

Either way works.
I will rewrite some of my scripting and include a config.ini file so you do not need to compile it yourself (and adjust the variables, that's how I've set things up for now, real quick dirty thing we're talking about here, at least for the moment).
However before I do that I will need to know if pushing or polling is the preferred strategy (I think pushing, one exe on one machine with one config file makes it a bit more maintainable).

p.s.
The script currently launches synctoycmd.exe with arguments. This does mean there's a command prompt popping up while synctoy's running. I can look into minimizing it etc but I do not believe I can make it disappear completely.

Awesome!! Thank you! I guess the only down side to this is that I have to always update the thumbnails, addons, etc folders from the same computer. It would be awesome if this could work from both of my PCs and sync items that have the most recent change in the case that a file is changed from both PCs.

To answer your question, I do think Push is the right method which would mean realtime synching. In either method, I assume you can set how often Synctoy runs? I am going to have to look more into this. By the way, what is the benefit of running a script? Couldnt I just download the app, set it up, and have it run in the background?