I hoped to hear some thoughts on how the community is sharing media to/from XBMC. In short, I'm using FTP but am thinking of changing to UPnP or SMB. Thoughts? Any life-changing or horror stories out there?
Some personal background for those who are interested (most of you can skip the rest of my post).
I've been happily using XBMC for a few years now, but have only recently gotten involved in using it for videos. I originally used XBMS to stream my media files to my Xbox, but didn't like running yet another server on my PCs and I wasn't impressed with the Server's features and reliability (perhaps it's improved?).
I was already running an FTP server so I started using it as the main method of getting media to my Xbox, but I've had many problems with it. Namely, videos will abrupt exit after being paused for long periods of time (probably connection timeouts), and I was unable to add multiple sources to a single share point (XBMC simply deleted my shares! How rude!). Performing a 'Library Clean' also seems to delete all FTP accessed media.. although I haven't looked into why yet.
From what I've read in the online documentation linked above, only XBMS and SMB can be used in this manner - has anyone tried this using UPnP shares? I was hoping the documentation is simply out-of-date...
UPnP looked to be the most promising option, as I see it being more and more useful in the future (1 protocol for PC to/from Xbox, PC to Xbox 360, etc, etc). My media is spread across 2 main PCs (main PC, old-PC-to-become-file-server), and I recently ordered a larger hdd to store most of my videos locally.
With media in all these places, plus more-or-less removable sources such as 3+ notebooks and the desire to share media to/from other Xboxes over the Internet (likely a VPN), UPnP looks to be one of the most promising options going forward. It would require installing another server on my PCs, but would fit other needs (i.e. Xbox 360, user-friendly, etc). FTP and XBMS seem to perform badly for me, and I like keeping the MS-bloat on my WinXP machine to be as light as possible so enabling SMB doesn't sound like a super appealing option.
Some personal background for those who are interested (most of you can skip the rest of my post).
I've been happily using XBMC for a few years now, but have only recently gotten involved in using it for videos. I originally used XBMS to stream my media files to my Xbox, but didn't like running yet another server on my PCs and I wasn't impressed with the Server's features and reliability (perhaps it's improved?).
I was already running an FTP server so I started using it as the main method of getting media to my Xbox, but I've had many problems with it. Namely, videos will abrupt exit after being paused for long periods of time (probably connection timeouts), and I was unable to add multiple sources to a single share point (XBMC simply deleted my shares! How rude!). Performing a 'Library Clean' also seems to delete all FTP accessed media.. although I haven't looked into why yet.
From what I've read in the online documentation linked above, only XBMS and SMB can be used in this manner - has anyone tried this using UPnP shares? I was hoping the documentation is simply out-of-date...
UPnP looked to be the most promising option, as I see it being more and more useful in the future (1 protocol for PC to/from Xbox, PC to Xbox 360, etc, etc). My media is spread across 2 main PCs (main PC, old-PC-to-become-file-server), and I recently ordered a larger hdd to store most of my videos locally.
With media in all these places, plus more-or-less removable sources such as 3+ notebooks and the desire to share media to/from other Xboxes over the Internet (likely a VPN), UPnP looks to be one of the most promising options going forward. It would require installing another server on my PCs, but would fit other needs (i.e. Xbox 360, user-friendly, etc). FTP and XBMS seem to perform badly for me, and I like keeping the MS-bloat on my WinXP machine to be as light as possible so enabling SMB doesn't sound like a super appealing option.
