[dorianG]

My First post: I have actually gotten everything to work in my set up from reading all your comments, guides and answers- now I have one question:

I have a Revo with XBMC live 10.1; I have a couple of Lacie Quadra drives;
they are shared on SAMBA as a NAS- it works I can transfer files to it over the network which is OK for a 175mb TV episode or even an AVI movie;

is there a way to plug a portable USB drive to the Revo and manage the files remotely IE: from a application like filezilla?

ultimately what I want to get away from doing is: unplugging all the USB drives and plugging them to my mac so I can move files around in finder; or transferring large MKV files over the network-


I would like to copy from a portable drive to the LACIE via USB while attached to the Revo but initiating the transfers from my laptop- I have a macbook so I loaded Filezilla and I can log in to XBMC, browse and transfer files (from the laptop to XBMC- and vice a versa)

so I thought I would just copy a file from media\USB A to media\USB B from Filezilla but it did not work; then i looked for something like flash FXP so I can have two sessions to XBMC and have 2 panes one with USB A and the other with USB B; and I could copy the files over with all the work being done in the XBMC without having the traffic come to my mac over wireless and then back to XBMC



Thanks Guys-

[branlr]

Hi Dorian--

I hope you don't take offense, but I found your description to be a bit convoluted and difficult to understand.

It SEEMS like you have this situation:

-acer revo with Lacie USB drives plugged through USB running XBMC LIVE.
-A Macbook that you are using to download or rip content that you want to use to add files to your library via samba, ftp, or whatever...

Is this correct?

If so...

You have a few options here...

1. I think that, for XBMCLive, the main idea is typically to have the media hosted on a SEPARATE machine on the network that is a dedicated NAS... And then you "stream" the content over samba... with a wired network, this should not be any problem... For wireless, you should be able to stream most things, but 1080p stuff might lag out sometimes, and you will definitely want wireless N.

But--alas--your other machine is a laptop. Being portable, this obviously makes it a poor NAS.

A lot of older machines can be gotten for 50-100 bucks that will do a fairly decent job of being an NAS. Also, if you have more money to spend, look for a user named "eskro" who posts on here a lot of great NAS builds that are very cheap too and mostly designed to work with UNRAID... but would not require unraid.

2. You could install a GUI on your XBMC Live install, or just install ubuntu or some user friendly form of linux yourself, and then instal XBMC on that... you could modify the installation so that it boots to a custom-created runlevel that loads XBMC but not the GUI, and if you needed you could exit to the terminal and change runlevels and get access to gnome, xfce, kde, or whatever gui you like...

If you did this, there is a script on these forums called Lasi that installs SABNZBD, sickbeard, etc... very quickly and easily on ubuntu... I am not sure how you are acquiring your media, but this could be an option... you could also use it for ripping I suppose, but might be too low power.

3. This is more specifically what you are asking for--It MIGHT be possible to assign a USB drive a default identity... like sda, sdb, sdc, etc.... and share that over samba... but I don't know how to do that--but hopefully you can use what I just set to google up an answer.

If you pursue this route, you will need to know which distribution of linux XBMCLive runs on, as I can't remember... then, you can google for how to achieve what I just described in that distribution.

Obstacles may include packages that are necessary to achieve this not being installed by default on XBMC Live, in which case you will need to install them yourself... AKA, this could seriously suck and be hard.

------

In general, this is my advice...

For now, just accept slow transfer over network and continue as is, with the hope of eventually getting a dedicated NAS, with INTERNAL hard drives. Reasons for this:

1. If you want to use multiple instances of XBMC in your house one day, it make sense to have centralized storage so that you can turn off each independent XBMC box to save power, and leave the NAS on all the time, since it would be a low powered machine.

2. From my experience, I would hate using USB drives, because USB is a horrible bottleneck. You would most likely get much better performance using internal hard drives on a motherboard with sufficient sata ports.

3. It allows you do do more sophisticated things to protect your data, such as raid and scheduled backups.

OR...

Put a more complete installation of linux on your machine and run XBMC from that, along with everything else you need (ripping software, SABNZBD, etc)

Since you mentioned that you have AVIs and MKV's, I'm assuming you are downloading your content. Use the HTPC to download the content, and you can command those downloading programs through their web interfaces from your laptop, and they will go straight to your HTPC's hard drives--no unnecessary transfer over your own network at all.

Hope this has helped you!

[vikjon0]

1) There is a file manage in xbmc
2) You can connect with ssh over the network and do what ever you want
3) Not sure why this is related (too much text) but you can mount an USB on uid to ensure the same mounting order each time
3) You can probably do this in filezilla
4) go to terminal, stop xbmc , type startx, this will start a window manager. In xbmc-live fluxbox but I have added gnome.
5) You can even access the window manager remotely while xbmc is playing on the console. (This is what I am doing)
6) You can most likely install a NAS admin software / linux web admin on top of xbmc live and use it. Perhaps more elegant than 5) but I am used to the remote desktop thing.

[dorianG]

No worries, I shouldn't post technical stuff while drinking Vino... and I'm doing it again

I had a Dell server with the same drives attached which are actually 2TB X4 SATA drives in RAID 5 and can do USB -FW- eSATA
Actually eSATA is how I had them on the Dell server, 3 arrays for Video and 2 for Music total of 20 SATA drives that was the set up I had when I had a TVICO and then I dropped the server when I switched to XBMC;


I wanted to consolidate as much gear as I could and just keep it minimal (heat - noise - power)

As far as whole house Audio/Video goes I have an apple TV (1) with XBMC on it getting content from the SAMBA shares off the Revo and I can stream DIVX and MP4 stuff with no stutter; anything above that I know it has to do with limitations on the apple TV so at some point I may get another Revo,

but for now the Revo with XBMC on it works as a NAS and a media center

Until I test out your suggestions and see which one is the best suited for my application, I'm just going to plug an ethernet when I transfer media-


Thank you for taking the time to read / decode and answer my question