[jmgibson1981]

Re-writing post to include pictures.

Living room tv. 4k Samsung 55". Behind it is Dell Optiplex 3010, older model with i5 3470. This machine used to be my server until recently replacing with the machine further down in post. This location is 90% Kodi, 10% desktop & minecraft use.



Master bedroom tv. 1080 Insignia 40". Got this one handed to me. No reason to waste it I suppose. Top right is an Antek ISK case holding an AM1 Sempron system. Kodi only.



The above machines are pxe booted via LTSP. There is also another box over at my folks house that pxe boots as well. 50" Vizio 4k. We hav ea cat 7 cable underground in a conduit between our places. I have a 32" Sony 1080p tv in the guest room but that machine is down, didn't bother to picture it.

And finally the server. Most recent acquisition, 100 bucks on Craigslist. Xeon E3 1225 with 16gb DDR3 ECC ram. OS Ubuntu 18.04 Server running headless. 1tb datacenter Western Digital drive holding OS + Mythtv dvr target. 3.5 hot swap above holds a single 1tb WD Caviar Green for media. The 4x 2.5 hot swap only has a single 2tb drive in it right now. The storage drives are pooled with mergerfs. The usb 3.0 drives on top are my snapraid parity. With the 3 empty bays as it sits, I can max at 9tb of total storage, 10 if I swap the 3.5 drive for a 2tb. For me to go beyond that would require increasing the size of my parity drives. As of right now it's taken us just under 5 years to break 2tb. No worries in that regard. I need to find a better spot to hide this machine, right now just under a desk in the guest room. This machine serves my nfs shares around the house as well as pxe boot images to all other machines in the house as needed. Also does Mariadb for libraries, among other things. Ups next to it. Need to upgrade that to.



My desktop. This machine can be PXE booted as well to Linux although I usually use it with Windows on the ssd for games. I put that monitor on the right for Kodi specifically.

[Video Titles]

I take it 1981 was your date of birth?

Dude I was 11 when you was born what you call low quality DVD's was a pleasure cruise around the World with free spending money and no sea sickness involved (2020 no corona virus either guaranteed)

Apart from black and white movies, you never had to put up with black and white TV, in the UK TV stations used to shut down at midnight and played the National anthem.

Yet you are talking like you were so hard done by.

As for lossless music, unless you have pitch perfect hearing you cannot tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC anyway. It is all BULL and the people are fake as hell.

If you are really into music then you would have vinyl and not CD's or MP3's so again more fakeness.

Sorry to the mods, but I am in a sarcastic mood tonight for some reason lol

[jmgibson1981]

I take it 1981 was your date of birth?

Dude I was 11 when you was born what you call low quality DVD's was a pleasure cruise around the World with free spending money and no sea sickness involved (2020 no corona virus either guaranteed)

Apart from black and white movies, you never had to put up with black and white TV, in the UK TV stations used to shut down at midnight and played the National anthem.

Yet you are talking like you were so hard done by.

As for lossless music, unless you have pitch perfect hearing you cannot tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC anyway. It is all BULL and the people are fake as hell.

If you are really into music then you would have vinyl and not CD's or MP3's so again more fakeness.

Sorry to the mods, but I am in a sarcastic mood tonight for some reason lol

its ok lol im not offended. I remember watching vhs. Hell i remember my parents renting a vcr of all things. long time ago. yes 81 exactly actually. im quite pleased with my dvd quality even compressed to an mkv.

i only mentioned it because i've seen people get into holy wars about qualities of bluray / 4k vs anything else on forums. they take it way to seriously. i like to watch movies, not marvel at how few pixels i can see. but if it works for them then good. they can keep it. same problem with the .flac or w/e other lossless for audio. i think they are full of crap. maybe they are, maybe they arent. isn't worth my time or money to try to find out. i figure if i have to buy special equipment to hear the minute differences, is it really that important?

[Jachin99]

I like the idea of putting everything in one spot and easily standing up clients. This would be my dream setup because it's a lot to just keep two Kodi instances as close to perfectly alike as possible.

[jmgibson1981]

It really does make it easy. That is another reason I shared it. I find management of potentially multiple machines to be made practically foolproof as well as exponentially quicker for maintenance. One chroot to update instead of x number of separate machines. I also have a desktop installed and when I need a linux system for whatever purpose I can pxe boot my desktop and use XFCE easily enough. I usually rip my movies and music through linux instead of Windows. Each machine uses a unique user and /home/"$USER"/.kodi so people can customize kodi their own way without interfering with others. Ultimately it works like a bunch of separate machines, just a single root filesystem and installation for management. Also guarantees an identical kodi version across the board. Can't possibly get dbs mixed by somehow mixing versions of Kodi. At the end of the day no matter how many clients you only manage 2 machines. The server and the pxe boot chroot.

I may write a guide for it as it took me awhile to sort out the little ins and outs to get this working perfectly. Fair amount of trial and error. But for a large deployment in a home or whatever one would want to do it makes a lot of sense actually. In my case my clients are nothing but Kodi. They are not full htpc with mouse and keyboard. Just the appropriate app on smartphone / tablet. Kore for droid, not sure of apple. Other benefit is you don't need an ssd / hard drive in each machine. Since it's all on the server and purely over the network. Only downside is wired networking is required. I don't believe pxe works via wifi.

*EDIT* Just for the record, I don't recommend heavy gaming when using a pxe boot desktop. But I can verify that Minecraft runs quite well depending on the clients hardware. The difference is nearly imperceptible from a local ssd or hard drive.

[Video Titles]

A picture would be nice, even if it looks boring, but would be nice to see what you are talking about. As the saying goes, a picture tells a thousand words, and I for one would sooner not read that many, so a pic would be nice.

[jmgibson1981]

Posting just to notify of pictures included in opening.

[tjay260476]

Nice setup! Also like the second monitor for just kodi on your workstation too. Also good server deployment too! Always envious with OP’s server deployments as mine is in a rack that I’ve had for a decade. If I were to build from scratch I would have a server that takes less space!

[jmgibson1981]

Decided to show the media mess in the garage as well. The only stuff not in either of these pictures is music owned on Amazon account, and 100+ gigabytes of stuff downloaded my religious organizations website. First picture is all DVD, tv show and movie. About 80 dvds per box, and I have no idea how many on that shelf. Kodi tells me I'm currently at 1141 movies, and according to the find command 1797 episodes of various tv shows. Second picture is the few physical cd's I have. Find command returns 4349 mp3 files in directory.

Ultimately I'm debating creating a full wall of shelves in my guest room and putting these all up.

[nicki365]

Decided to show the media mess in the garage as well. The only stuff not in either of these pictures is music owned on Amazon account, and 100+ gigabytes of stuff downloaded my religious organizations website. First picture is all DVD, tv show and movie. About 80 dvds per box, and I have no idea how many on that shelf. Kodi tells me I'm currently at 1141 movies, and according to the find command 1797 episodes of various tv shows. Second picture is the few physical cd's I have. Find command returns 4349 mp3 files in directory.

Ultimately I'm debating creating a full wall of shelves in my guest room and putting these all up.

No point in having media if its not being used.

[jmgibson1981]

Having the physical media keeps it legal where I am. I know i'm allowed to keep "backups" of anything I own. However if I get rid of the original, then they become pirated, as far as I know anyway. They don't take up much space really. That and I'd like to have them displayed at some point. Just waiting to figure out where to display them properly.