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Im trying to stitch together an elegant home media network based on xbmc but every approach lack something.

The Scenario: 2 floors with 120 m2 (1300 sq.ft.) Gigabit-Ehernet between the floors and to the Livingroom-TV, Office etc, Wifi-N seperate for every floor (very "armoured" concrete steel walls).

Equipment (that matters ) AppleTV with Crystal HD, Dreambox DM800, iMac with OSX Server (always on), Macbook Pro, Macbook, Asus 1000H with OSX, an iPad, 2 iPods 1G, Android Phones, Symbian Phones.

The OSX Server pulls the torrents from my showrss feed an they get downloaded with transmission and moved into a shared folder.

I want to have access to all downloaded TVShows and already sorted Music and Movies from the Notebooks, the iPad and the AppleTV. The iPods 1G are kind of Airport Express replacements with XBMC Streamer for active and Airfoil Speakers for passive Music.

Is there a way not to have XBMC running on the Server just as Media Server? (lot of ressources wasted) or a way to trim XBMC down (because its not needed on the iMac)

Or any Ideas for a more elegant solution?

My 2p

I personally went down the NAS route myself. I initially owned a netgear ready nas which i used for storage of movies, tv and video and it fed several instances of xbmc over smb/nfs (also has upnp, DNLA, itunes, squeezebox etc etc).

As my demands grew i purchased a qnap (atom) which run bittorrent, usenet, sickbeard etc) initially had them up and running on the older readynas but the processor wasnt up to it).

Its a 24/7 machine, with relatively low power consumption and a pretty active userbase for adding packages (even talk of getting tvheadend running )

I also "play" around with an ubuntu headless server but would recommend the simplicity of a qnap (or newer readynas/synology/drobo).

Have a google at it, there are methods of not only feeding xbmc but ipods, android and wndows laptops.

Any tips for accessing videos, I havnt found a way yet to access video from the ipad.

Air Video should let you stream your movies to your iPad.

As a non elegant workaround it would work May I let Plex Media Server running on the Server iMac to provide TV Shows to my Wives iPad

But if you think about it a XMBC Media Server is not too far away. If the DB is already in a MySQL we just need a Webserver to provide the XML Backend to imitate a full blown XBMC

Orb Live is another way to go: http://www.orb.com/orblive

Mmmh, ok, I think the simplest thing would be to just provide for the ipad with air video. its not worth more work.

So its about running xbmc on the server as mediacenter server (to provide the db for other xbmcs and the ipods . (btw. dharma on the appletv with osx is unusable slow)

Dharma on OSX AppleTV is fine with Alaska skin.

from the speed the alaska skin works, however I also get a lot of "black-outs" an resets of the the hdmi out (doenst happen with 9.1)

OK, I enabled DDS in the advanced settings, connected the iTV XBMC install to my main mysql and copied over the thumbnails and now its running super smooth even with confluence after a reinstall of xbmc (with a downgrade in between) also my blackouts are gone)

now it starts to come together slowley

I'm now running the plex media server parallel to provide audio via plex ios clients. so no direct need to leave xbmc running.

does anybody know where the "renderer" settings for the crystal hd is stored? I wnat to sync my user folder between the machines but dont wont to mess with device specific system settings.

Just for anybody who intends to bring up a similar setup:

1 mysql for all XBMCs, all Media housed on a iMac with OSX. Thumbnails Folder, sources.xml etc. are synced with rsync between the different computers (all running 10.6 & 1 iTV1)

Plex Mediaserver is running alongside on the osxserver to provide streaming video and audio to all iOS devices.