[dhaskwn]

Im running mediatomb (dlna/upnp) on linux and serving my files from there. However I was hoping that I would have xbmc's pretty interface with all the info about a tv series or movie (nice picture, descritpion, things you get when youre viewing a movie file in a local drive), but all I get are filenames.

It is my understanding that this info is provided by the server. Well I was hoping to run xbmc as a service but for some reason it has server functions (upnp) but you cant run it as a daemon (hard because my linux box is headless).

Is there anyway to get this information to xbmc running on windows. Goal #1 is to get this info properly displayed in xbmc, goal #2 is to have that server run on linux (though I suppose a windows tversity server would work, though I have no idea if it would). Any solutions?

Thanks!
jack

[topfs2]

Not sure exactly what your after. Upnp doesn't give that much. enough to display and perhaps enough to further scrape if we assume server has gotten basics right. In Upjohn land server does most of the heavy lifting

[dhaskwn]

Thanks for your help.

Well if xbmc is good enough at scraping for local files, what does from the server for scraping dlna provided files?

Are you saying that there are no clients/server setups that will have nice display of file info?

[mrfatboy]

Thanks for your help.

Well if xbmc is good enough at scraping for local files, what does from the server for scraping dlna provided files?

Are you saying that there are no clients/server setups that will have nice display of file info?

Check Plex out.

[Starstream]

XBMC gets this info by looking at the filename, many UPnP servers obscure the filename changing it to something else in their listings.

It is possible to get it to work, if the UPnP server provides an unmodified filename to XBMC though there are some quirks like you cannot alter the identity of an item if it is wrong the only way to correct it is to erase the database and start again. Ps3 Media Server is one of the few that does expose the filename, scraping must be done at folder level listings not at the root of the UPnP server listings.

NFS support is coming to XBMC, you might to wait for that if you are avoiding Samba for some reason.

[topfs2]

Thanks for your help.

Well if xbmc is good enough at scraping for local files, what does from the server for scraping dlna provided files?

Are you saying that there are no clients/server setups that will have nice display of file info?

I'm saying that the idea behind upnp is that the server does the heavy lifting, they provide us with information and we have to assume its correct. So with movies they state title, producer, genre and such. If we assume title is correct we could do a scrape pass for that, but if the server doesn't provide that correctly we can't do anything

So one can perfectly well make a upnp server which does some scraping and creates proper titles but afaik most servers are really terrible at this, sadly.
And sadly is that there exist no real serie parts of upnp, the video parts of upnp is missing a bit sadly, atleast in the earlier MediaServer implementations (which most use). Its a lot better in MediaServer:4 but I don't know any server which implements this, there it even have watched status and everything we would need tbh.

So what starstream says is correct, most servers doesn't provide the "real" filename, nor should they tbh. The whole point with the files urls they give is that they are virtual or ID's, its meant to support transcoding and such so the real filename doesn't really make sense.

EDIT: The design behind upnp might seem bad but in fact its very good, the problem is that most servers sadly bastardize it, especially with dlna. Server doing the heavy lifting is a very smart design, its better suited to do the work and it allows for thin clients, its sad that no really good server exist yet.