Kodi Community Forum

I have some decent computer skills, building, fixing, troubleshooting... but networking not so much.

Right now, I have a computer, pair of 3TB drives, one for movies and one for TV series, and a 250GB drive as my C:\ running Win7x64. I use the computer as a regular system, and have a 10' HDMI running to my TV which displays XBMC. Not a great system, bit older, but I notice no lag or problems watching a movie and running Photoshop at the same time.

Friend gave me an old system of his, and was debating using it in another room. Older, smaller drives, no network access. I have a wireless card for it though and I have a wireless router.

What I was wondering was

1) Can I run XBMC on the other computer, and wirelessly connect to my media on this system?
2) If it can, being wireless, would it stream well enough to be worthwhile?
2) Will it work if the other computer is running WinXP SP3, or been debating on trying UBUNTU?

I simply want to setup view only access to the two 3TB drives, no access to make changes or anything, just if someone else wants to watch a movie, they can start it up and pick a movie to watch, rather than constantly copying it from my server to a DVD-RW and hoping the DVD player has the proper codecs installed.

Thanks for any help/advice.

1. Yes. You can either use file sharing and have different libraries, or use UPnP or MySQL to share libraries: Syncing and sharing (wiki). I recommend using UPnP sharing.

2. Depends greatly on RF interference and the quality of network equipment you have. It's totally possible to be able to stream HD video, but typically it's best to run a wire if you can. No harm in trying wireless first, though.

3. Ubuntu. XBMC v13 will drop XP support, so you might as well prepare now :)

Bummer, I liked WinXP... though hard to believe it's what, 12yrs old now?

I have Win7x64 on my system, but only 1 licences, and the old computer I'm getting is just below spec... that's why debated WinXP and UBUNTU, because I have a few licences for XP and UBUNTU is just free. I was just worried about getting Win7 and UBUNTU to 'jive' together since different O/S's. That being said, I heard UBUNTU works very well, and less resource hungry than Windows systems? Sorta like an Apple MAC? (side note, I miss my MAC).

But if I know it "can" work, then I'll give it a try... just didn't want to pull my hair out in frustration and find out later no, it can't be done.

You can do this over wifi but I think you will run into issues as far as bandwidth is concerned.
You can probably stream any SD content but any HD content you will start to buffer and have a bad user experience.

I gave up on wifi and for rooms I couldn't run CAT6 I used PowerLine which I am happy with.

As far as Windows and Linux "jiving" that is no issue at all.
Setup a windows share on your PC that has the 3TB drives and connect to that share from the remote linux box.

I would suggest you try a openelec distro and see how it works.