[Aenima99x]

Just wondering if anyone has a similar situation or has any ideas on this.
I currently have an AsRock ION running XBMC LIVE in my living room. It's connected via Gig ethernet to my Synology NAS. The HTPC mounts the NAS shares via NFS.
The NAS has all media on it as well as the central MySQL DB. (I also run SSH, SAB, SickBeard, & CouchPotato on it). This setup all works flawlessly.
I'm now getting ready to setup another XBMC Live install in the kids room - I have no problem getting it setup to use the MySQL DB on the NAS and a local profile to limit what they can do.
Now on to my question....there are definitely some movies I don't want them to have access to, so what's the best method for using the central MySQL DB, but limiting what movies they can access?

[crego]

Is it safe to assume you don't even want the titles showing up? Asking because if that's not a concern, I'm thinking you could do something with file/directory security so that the uid running on the kid's box wouldn't have access to the files in question (or questionable files?!?)

If you don't want the titles to show up, two ideas came to mind:

1. Add something to the titles or make the rating something like "X" and use a Smart Playlist - just not sure if you can restrict playback to just what's in a playlist (I poked around quickly and couldn't find a way to do it)
   
2. Have a separate DB and keep them in sync manually
   

[Aenima99x]

Is it safe to assume you don't even want the titles showing up? Asking because if that's not a concern, I'm thinking you could do something with file/directory security so that the uid running on the kid's box wouldn't have access to the files in question (or questionable files?!?)

If you don't want the titles to show up, two ideas came to mind:

1. Add something to the titles or make the rating something like "X" and use a Smart Playlist - just not sure if you can restrict playback to just what's in a playlist (I poked around quickly and couldn't find a way to do it)
   
2. Have a separate DB and keep them in sync manually
   

Yeah I'd prefer the movies not even showing....you know, eliminate the temptation all together. I was thinking maybe I could set permissions on the files to limit them that way, but that could be a pain when new movies are added. I was also thinking maybe I could create a share on the NAS called something like "Kids" and inside the folder have symlinks to the actual files/movies they're allowed watch on the Movies share. Just not sure how that would work with the DB.

[crego]

Since you're using the library, unless you have non-XBMC reasons for doing so, you can kind of abstract away the file system structure. You could have something like nas://videos/Movies_NSFK (not safe for kids) and nas://videos/Movies and on your box, add both as sources and on the kid's, only the "Movies" one.

As far as the library DB itself goes, I'm still thinking about two separate DBs that you keep in sync. How much in sync they need to be would be the big question/complexity I think. If all you really need to "push" from the kid's library to the "main" one is something like the Watched status, it might not be too big a job to write a script to keep them both up to date.

[vikjon0]

I havent looked in to the details yet, but it may be possible to set something up where some tables are shared, some separate while some shares a subset. The exact solution would depend on current architecture, mysql and how xbmc is connecting to the db.