[foogama]

I'm relatively new, so I apologize if this is covered elsewhere in the forums, I couldn't find it but it's possible I was just searching for the wrong things in the wrong place. I'm building a Windows 7 HTPC that will run both Windows Media Center and xbmc. I plan on housing a variety of saved media on that device in several different formats to include a music library, video library, DVR recordings, ripped BluRays, etc. My question is as follows:

Is it possible to run xbmc on RPi that can pull my HTPC saved media over my home network? For example: I DVR live TV shows through WMC onto my HTPC, then I play them in my bedroom TV that is hooked up to a RPi with xbmc? If there's a specific setup that my HTPC would need to be for this to work (e.g. a linux build of xbmc) then I'm open to that as well. Ideally, I'd like to have my HTPC be a hub for all storage/media, and then I could just have several RPi xbmc's throughout my home to locally stream the content.

[Oxyg3n]

In a word. YES. It is possible to do what you are suggesting, however there may be some caveat's in the setup.

Sharing is usually done over Samba/CIFS (Windows File Sharing) or NFS (Linux file sharing) depending on this host OS.

As for your TV, you may want to look at the PVR side of XBMC, figure out the backend, what you can/can't support (depending on service provider) this will be a factor into which OS you use (note: with tvheadend I have experienced the fastest channel switching, this uses linux as the OS)

Outside of that, what you are talking about is pretty standard stuff, if you would like to elaborate more on your current setup I would be happy to point you in the right direction

[foogama]

As for your TV, you may want to look at the PVR side of XBMC, figure out the backend, what you can/can't support (depending on service provider) this will be a factor into which OS you use (note: with tvheadend I have experienced the fastest channel switching, this uses linux as the OS)

Outside of that, what you are talking about is pretty standard stuff, if you would like to elaborate more on your current setup I would be happy to point you in the right direction

Thanks for the reply. Ideally I'd like to use WMC for live TV and DVRing on my HTPC, and then locally stream the recorded TV files to the RPi. In other words, I'm not all too worried about having live TV accessible directly through my RPi, it's only the DVR content and video libraries from my HTPC I'd be interested in accessing. Having said that, do you think something like tvheadend would still be necessary?

I'm completely open to which OS to put on the RPi, but based on recent developments and releases, I'm under the impression that OpenELEC would be that way to go for something like this. If I do that, is it possible to share files on my HTPC (Windows based) system, with my RPi (Linux based) system? I'm unfamiliar with the rules of Samba/CIGS vs NFS.

[Oxyg3n]

To only watch recorded TV, you should be ok without a PVR backend and just share the recorded tv folders.

I personally on my RPi's use raspBMC, that's not to say OpenELEC is bad, I just preferred raspBMC for me, however I am a little more of an intermediate user so I like to play a little without getting my hands too dirty.

OpenELEC is more for a "plug n play" scenario, so is probably your optimal choice.

NFS/CIFS there is a large debate about in terms of speed, personally I run Samba/CIFS on a gigabit network and have rarely noticed any of the problems people say they are having with it (the RPi has a 100mbit NIC so I do have couple of 1080p movies buffer for a second at high bitrate points)

CIFS is the easiest (I'm assuming you have a Windows background) to setup if you are running Windows Vista/7/8 it's pretty much right click the folder and go to the "Share with" menu


EDIT: NFS is easy too if you are confident enough to run around the shell for 5mins, it would probably consist of something like installing nfs and editing the /etc/exports file to allow the share

[philhu]

FYI - CIFS/SMB and NFS both work.

NFS is 'better' for the rPi IMHO.

It is pretty easy to setup. Seems about 20% faster transferring data over the network and honors
user/group information, unlike most CIFS implementations. This doesn't seem to important, unless you want
to start installing other items on your rPi, like Sickbeard, SABNzbd, etc, which usually require security settings on the mounted network volume

When I was doing CIFS, it *DID* allow you to mount a drive with an owner and group, which got SB,CP,SAB working, but NFS was *so* much easier once setup. If interested in this, for the rPi, running raspbmc, look at rpcbind, nfs-common and nfs-kernel-server, the latter must be downloaded with apt-get. Then put your shared drive in /etc/exports and you are all set

[nickr]

Don't forget if Windows is recording encrypted material to encrypted files (as it does), you won't be able to watch them on any other machine, including RPi.