2012-07-29, 00:57
Issue:
Sometimes you do not have a fast enough access to your fileserver (e.g. WLAN connection and you want to watch HD content) or you want to select certain videos that you want to be able to watch on the road (e.g. when using XBMC on the laptop) or you are using an embedded device like the Raspberry Pi that is not equipped with enough storage for all your media files.
Solution:
In such situations it would be nice if you could mark files from your central media repository to be cached on local storage. Like if you want to rent videos online, you could mark the videos, you would like to watch next and in the background the folders get synchronized to your local cache dir.
The cache should get monitored for the amount of free space. Optionally, older files and watched videos should get deleted automatically, and the next files that are in the to-be-copied list should get cached. If the source is not available, the copy should resume, the next time it is available again (e.g. for the mobile XBMC on a laptop).
A special button should select content at random so that only a selection of all video content gets cached and you have always a filled cache with new content to watch.
Different users should have different queues.
What do you think about this feature? As I can write Python, I also like to help to implement this feature.
However I would like to discuss first, what the best way is, to implement the caching.
Also I would need some time to get to know the XBMC API...
Sometimes you do not have a fast enough access to your fileserver (e.g. WLAN connection and you want to watch HD content) or you want to select certain videos that you want to be able to watch on the road (e.g. when using XBMC on the laptop) or you are using an embedded device like the Raspberry Pi that is not equipped with enough storage for all your media files.
Solution:
In such situations it would be nice if you could mark files from your central media repository to be cached on local storage. Like if you want to rent videos online, you could mark the videos, you would like to watch next and in the background the folders get synchronized to your local cache dir.
The cache should get monitored for the amount of free space. Optionally, older files and watched videos should get deleted automatically, and the next files that are in the to-be-copied list should get cached. If the source is not available, the copy should resume, the next time it is available again (e.g. for the mobile XBMC on a laptop).
A special button should select content at random so that only a selection of all video content gets cached and you have always a filled cache with new content to watch.
Different users should have different queues.
What do you think about this feature? As I can write Python, I also like to help to implement this feature.
However I would like to discuss first, what the best way is, to implement the caching.
Also I would need some time to get to know the XBMC API...