Kodi Community Forum

This is my first post. Not sure if this is the right place to put this. If not feel free to move it to the appropriate place.

I just put together an HTPC, win 7 pro, Intel I5 processor, Asus z77 mobo, 8gb ram, 128GB SSD for the OS, 4 TB storage drive and a Hauppauge 2250 ATSC OTA tuner card. Right now I’m running WMC for live/recorded tv, Netflix, Hulu Plus and MB2 to view my ripped movie collection. I call this setup version 1.0 The setup gets the job done for right now. Between the 10 OTA stations, Netflix and Hulu plus I’m not missing the 140.00 a month bill to receive 450 stations of nothing to watch.

My current setup is kind of clunky and a little intimidating for my wife. I cancelled my satellite subscription last week so she has no choice but to learn.

I’m really excited about installing XBMC after the first of the year. I’m too busy at work to take on the upgrade before then. Between the slick look, addons, and the prospect of controlling everything from one screen I’m more than ready.

I’ve been reading the Wiki, forums, and anything else I can get my hands for the last couple of weeks. I have an old Pentium based desktop running XP sp3 that I would like to download xbmc to and start experimenting. This way when (not if) I crash and burn I’m not disrupting our only source of television. I’m an old duffer with pretty much no programming experience. Although not having experience never stopped me before. This HTPC was my first PC build and it turned out great so far. If I take enough notes, google, test and experiment, and reload when necessary I should be able to make a viable, solid system that the wife will be able to use.

If I get my setup working on the old xp, which will be stand alone, can I copy the setup to my HTPC or will I have to re-enter all of my settings on the permanent system manually? I haven’t found anything in my reading that says yes or no regarding this. XP is 32 bit, Win 7 is 64 so I’m not sure if that will be an issue.

Thanks for the advice ahead of time and sorry this is such a long winded question.

I guess I should’ve stepped away from the third pot of coffee today.

Welcome to the forum and welcome to the XBMC journey. I'm sure you'll come to love it as another child. You'll probably spend just as much time with it :-)

Yes, you can move your basic settings around. The question is whether you'll want to... if you think of your XP machine as a playground, you'll inevitably do something, change it, tweak it and fiddle a few more times before you're happy. The end result is what you want to replicate, not the path that got there, so I'd suggest keeping copious notes and then reconfiguring from those. Remember that the hardware is different, so there may be some specific settings that are unique to each machine.

Also, if you export the library (the artwork, paths, descriptions, etc. of all of your media files) then re-importing that doesn't take long. I can set up a basic XBMC machine from scratch in only a few minutes, and have it fully populated with data from my NAS in not many more; that's partly experience, partly because things are set up that way, but a lot is to do with XBMC being far less onerous than it may seem.

Mind you, there'll be someone along in a moment with a customised skin, heavily-modified advancedsettings, files stored on faerie mushrooms that can only be accessed by 10BaseGossamerThread, and so on.

Thanks for the quick reply. My kids are grown and gone and the grandkids are 4 hours away so I usually have a lot of free time for a new adventure. The fiddling and tweaking is what I'm looking forward to. I love making just about everything I own customized to my liking. Some of the addons and skins look really awesome. I'm hoping they work as well as I imagine. Getting some of the HGTV and DIY episodes that were on satelite will make the boss very happy. I saw a few addons that should fill that gap. It might not be live tv but it'll be the next best thing.

I've already started putting together a list of what I want to accomplish especially making this whole system wife proof. Gotta keep the boss happy.

Oh, btw, stay away from those faerie mushrooms. I tried them in 1972, the next three years were a blur.

I would consider installing and running XBMC in portable mode -- create a desktop shortcut to launch it with -p switch on the "target" line. This way everything on your test and later production setups are stored within the XBMC folder tree making it easy to copy files between systems.

Besides setting up XBMC itself, you will need to figure out how you are going to store your local content. If you set up the same drive/folder structure on your development machine as you will use on the production machine it should make things relatively painless. Even with that, I recommend exporting your libraries when you are done and importing them when you move all your content over. Same thing with the thumbnails, even though I think if all your folders are the same you could copy the thumbs and they would still work.

If you like WMC so far, you might consider using the WMC pvr client for live TV which uses WMC as its main backend engine. If your XP machine is networked you can install the pvr client on the XP XBMC and get live tv sorted out there.

The harder part will be using the remote. Since the Hauppauge is on the production system you will have to wait until you are close to going live and then get the remote working on the production system.

scott s.
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Thanks for the insight Scott. I came across a thread showing how to set up WMC as the back end live/recorded tv. Ill have to find it again and subscribe to it so I have the info handy when I'm ready to start working.

Right now I have my folders set up a little strange. I made folders for each genre. I currently have MB2 installed. At first I had all my movies in one folder. I let MB sort by genre but I didn't like the results. The same movies showed up in different genres. I'm an old war movie buff. Some of them were turning up in history because they were based on true incidents. I came across another thread here about how to edit the movie genres so there is only one genre per movie. I'll have to find it once more and bookmark it. That should get me the results I would like.

I have a harmony one so I'm fairly confident I'll be able to customize it enough to make starting netflix etc a fairly easy operation. At least I hope I can.