NOOB : exporting/importing
#1
Hello all,

I'm new to the world of XBMC and already totally addicted. What a beautiful tool.

However, I have a question.

Currently, I have a laptop and an external USB HD. When I discovered XBMC last week, I installed the tool on this laptop and now I'm arranging all my MP3s, photos ... in a good dir structure for XBMC. It's a lot of fun. However, I'm planning on buying a new HD and perhaps a PC or something just for XBMC (for my man cave set up ;-). My question now is ... If I copy my arranged items to this new HD, install XBMC on a new system and link the HD to this new system, is there a way to get all my multimedia I'm downloading now on this laptop as wel on the new system? Can you use the export function for this? I mean, on a new system, the HD might not be d:\ as it is now. Does this then mean I have to change the path manually for all the directories I'm creating in XBMC?

Thank you already for you time.

Cheers,
Grave
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#2
For videos: If you get all your files set up on the current external drive and then scan all this info to the library you can then export the library info to individual files. This will copy nfo file to the directories where the movies are saved. If you then move all the movies and associated directories to a new machine / drive when xbmc updates the library it can read fromt he local files

For photos: XBMC doesn't use a libray mode so you can't export the data. It always works in file mode

For music: Not sure how exporting the library data works.

But for all of this, if you want to have your libraries synced between the laptop and the new PC you will need to set up an external database. Trying searching for "mysql" in the forums and it gives you all the info on how to do this. There are a few laerge threads covering it. Then you only need to update the library once by one of the clients and the new updates will be seen by all other clients that connect to that mysql database.
Openelec on ASRock ION 330 / Kodi on Win 7 PC
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#3
Thank you for the info, really appreciate it. I hope the music library works in the same way as the movie lib does, that seems perfect for my situation.

Regarding the mysql db, I will delve deeper into this, but I guess you are talking here about a situation where the different pc are all linked to a server runnning the SQL DB?


Thanks,
Grave
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#4
I've just never tried exporting music to multiple files (or even know if you can). To test you could set up a new profile on one of your machines and add a new source separate to your normal music source and test it out so you don't bork your data if something goes wrong.

The mySQL option doesn't need a dedicated server per se. It does need mySQL to be running on at least one machine and the other clients connect to that machine. That machine could be a client as well but you may experience performance issues. As far as I know its the only way to synchronise metadata, bookmarks, watched status etc between different machines.

You can get a resonably cheap NAS to run the mySQL database if you find performance to be an issue.

If you are just pointing to a shared directory with a local XBMC database then you will need to scrape the data for each client each time somethign is added to the library. Not so much of an issue of you get one client how you want it, export the data to multiple files then the importon the other machines will be reasonably quick.
Openelec on ASRock ION 330 / Kodi on Win 7 PC
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#5
rocketpants Wrote:Not so much of an issue of you get one client how you want it, export the data to multiple files then the importon the other machines will be reasonably quick.

That's what I think too ... Exactly what I need. Thanks!
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