Kodi Community Forum

Hello everyone,

I am am running 4 HTPC's with XBMCbuntu Eden with a NAS serving my media via SMB,NFS, and PLEX, HD HOMERUN, and a MythTV Box. Yes I know that it is overkill.

The Real Question

On occasion, I want to watch exactly what is playing on another XBMC box. The only practical solution that I see is a MATRIX Switch but I realized that this gets expensive quickly because I need 2 HDMI Extenders per XBMC Box/TV and at least a 4X4 Matrix switch. As you can see this will get a little pricey and I will have to run Cables everywhere I thought about using VLS or UPNP and importing them as network streams on each box but I can't figure out how to stream what is being display and played on one XBMC box as a live stream.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

i have gone through the same thought process, and to run the hdmi matrix, the best way would be to run 1 hdmi cable to each viewing room from a centralized place (server/switch room) where all of your xbmc machines reside. this will allow fewer runs of cable, but will get rid of the set-top box feel and make using a dvd or any other disk tougher. the nice thing, is you could basically assign a xbmc box for each user that could be in the house, and you for instance, get xbmc1 as a dedicated machine to view whatever you want, using the hdmi matrix to put the feed in whatever open room you want. this gets expensive as you add more room, and cabling is not cheap.

what i have considered the best alternative, tho i have not started this project yet, is to try to manage the playlists using json requests from scripts in a web front end like maraschino, or even a custom made page.

what i think will work: you will start the video/playlist on any machine (any room), this will be known as current master, after selecting what client machines you want to sync with the master, the web script will then send a json request to the master and pause playback and get the playlist and current time stamp. the script will then push the playlist, and current time stamp to the client boxes, then send the play signal to all the machines, hoping to come as close to a real sync as possible.

i dont know how functional this will be as there is likely to be some delay for each box depending on hardware speed differences and even how much cable the signal has to run through for each room, the sync may be off by upto a few seconds..

there are alternative ways some people are working on including something with squeezebox i think, there is a thread with an addon floating around this site, but i think it was only for windows and you had to run the associated server.