[brettg]

Hi guys

I use xbmc on a few PC's (Mint/Ubuntu) and it works great.

I have all my media files exporting via NFS on a (headless) Ubuntu server.

Everything works fine, but it always bothers me that the library metadata is managed on the client side with xbmc so when, for example I watch something on PC 1, it is not marked as watched on PC 2.

I reckoned I could maybe fix that by putting my .xbmc directory on the server and sharing it between the PCs, but this didn't work out.

So my question is, how do you guys generally setup your networks to avoid this situation? Do any of the Linux based Open Source DLNA/UPnP servers work with xbmc down to that level? I know xbmc does include a DNLA client but does it include functionality above just the simple streaming of media files?

Is having multiple, seperataly managed xbmc "islands" the only way or is there a better solution?

I tried Plex media server but quite frankly it was a CPU hog and never seemed to finish sitting at 100% CPU while allegedly sorting through my library so after a few weeks of waiting I got rid of it. I never did try and connect to it from xbmc. Perhaps I should have.

Anyway, any thoughts, ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Oh and merry Christmas!

[brettg]

Just to follow up, I just found this;
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW...g_up_MySQL

Looks promising, I will give that a go.

[hogfan]

You need to use advancedsettings.xml and setup a central MYSQL DB. However, to keep things playing nice, you will need to keep your XBMC boxes at the same XBMC version to ensure compatibility.

[brettg]

Thanks hogfan

I've got it all set up and it works fine. I also upgraded all my PC's to unstable/Frodo to take advantage of the new font caching stuff. The performance of this new system is not perfect due to delays while scrolling fast for the poster artwork to catch up but it is early days yet. All in all it is a great improvement.