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HOW-TO synchronize your XBMC Media Center between every room in the house: Lifehacker - Printable Version

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- clambert - 2011-02-02 04:15

NickSoapdish Wrote:I was just reading about that. If I store the files (images, nfo, etc) with the actual video content itself, can I bypass the need to share it on the WHS? In my set up, XBMC doesn't really need to do any scraping because it should be done before hand after videos are saved on the network.

I'm no expert, someone else might want to chime in, but if everything is already scraped and it's located with the video, it should use that by default.


- NickSoapdish - 2011-02-03 02:56

I'm having an issue setting up my second pc with the MySql database. The first pc worked well, all the tv and movie media showed up in the right places and a quick of the MySql DB shows that there is data in it.

The second PC was a new install of XBMC 10 and I was able to populate the Movie data completely. When I try to import the TV shows, it begins with a show that is not even in my collection "Al TV" and populates all my episodes for other shows under "Al TV'.

While I think Weird Al is a fine entertainer, I'd rather have an accurate library. Any ideas as to what is happening?


- clambert - 2011-02-03 03:06

NickSoapdish Wrote:The second PC was a new install of XBMC 10 and I was able to populate the Movie data completely. When I try to import the TV shows, it begins with a show that is not even in my collection "Al TV" and populates all my episodes for other shows under "Al TV'.

You shouldn't need to import on the second machine if you already have the database populated with your movies, music, and shows? Did you add the advancedsettings.xml to the new install? That should have found the MySQL database that contains all that information. You only are importing when you have an empty MySQL database.

Have you tested to see if the resume is working from one machine to the next? That will tell you quickly if you're utilizing the MySQL database correctly.


- IAmNotAUser - 2011-02-03 12:21

NickSoapdish Wrote:I'm having an issue setting up my second pc with the MySql database. The first pc worked well, all the tv and movie media showed up in the right places and a quick of the MySql DB shows that there is data in it.

The second PC was a new install of XBMC 10 and I was able to populate the Movie data completely. When I try to import the TV shows, it begins with a show that is not even in my collection "Al TV" and populates all my episodes for other shows under "Al TV'.

While I think Weird Al is a fine entertainer, I'd rather have an accurate library. Any ideas as to what is happening?

This sounds to me like you checked the TV Scraper option something like "All episodes in this folder are from a single series" when you set the content type. I did this repeatedly when I was creating my testing environment and rescanning a lot.

But as clambert said, you shouldn't need to scrape if you're using a MySQL database correctly.


- NickSoapdish - 2011-02-03 21:17

clambert and IamNotaUser - I think I had issues with what both of you posted. My advancedsettings.xml was not in the correct directory and I had checked the "All episodes in this folder are from a single series". My mini Lenovo keyboard/mouse is a little unreliable at times and I think was partially responsible for my errors.

The TV series are listed in the Library and I did the test of stopping on one PC and resuming from the other with success, so all is good there.

Just had to do a rescan of the Movies directory to get that to repopulate, so I think everything is going to turn out ok in the end.

Thanks again for your help, much appreciated.


XBMC external mysql library updater?!?! - nokdim - 2011-02-04 22:59

I have 3 systems running XBMC all in sync to the same mysql db.

Everything works great on the db side.

I also have a server (Sun Ultra 60) that runs the mysql db as well as sickbeard and couchpotato that is a separate machine from all my XBMC enabled machines. All the media is stored on a buffalo 2TB NAS which is a mount on the Sun box.

I have one XBMC system setup to do a library update on start-up which works but means that my library only gets updated when that machine has XBMC restarted, or when a command is sent from sickbeard to run a library update.

Although when the db was local not mysql it made sense to only update on restart but with the db offloaded is there a better way?

Is there some sort of linux/windows shell/batch script that can scan the folders of my NAS and update the mysql library with new episodes/movies?

I checked a few forums and found one on the sickbeard web-site where they were asking sickbeard to implement a direct write to the mysql db from sickbeard which seems overly complicated.

http://sickbeard.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=505


Pretty much I am looking for a quick and dirty way to run a library update without having to do it within XBMC.


- clambert - 2011-02-04 23:04

nokdim Wrote:Is there some sort of linux/windows shell/batch script that can scan the folders of my NAS and update the mysql library with new episodes/movies?

This is something I have been wanting to do myself. I hope someone is able to come up with something.


- ^FrEaK^ - 2011-02-05 21:06

why do you need to have the xbmc on the server? i also have all my media stored on a server, and have moved all my thumbs ect. to my server and linked them to all the other xbmc machines, so it's just the first xbmc that starts that has to update the library with new stuff, and since that almost never is more than a movie or a couple of episodes of some series, that only takes a few seconds, so i don't see the reason for complicating things?


- tboooe - 2011-02-05 21:20

^FrEaK^ Wrote:why do you need to have the xbmc on the server? i also have all my media stored on a server, and have moved all my thumbs ect. to my server and linked them to all the other xbmc machines, so it's just the first xbmc that starts that has to update the library with new stuff, and since that almost never is more than a movie or a couple of episodes of some series, that only takes a few seconds, so i don't see the reason for complicating things?

Do you see any delay issues with the thumbs folder on your server? I am thinking about moving mine to my NAS. I think that perhaps my NAS may be too slow.


- twotone8 - 2011-02-06 04:59

i have absolutely no understanding of mysql, so i rigged something a bit simpler (to my eyes)

i use a program called freefilesync, which is a tiny little user-friendly application for syncing multiple files over a network. it allows you to set a silent running batch file to sync two (or more) directories.

i run xbmc in portable mode, and keep an intact version of the xbmc directory on my NAS. on each computer using xbmc, i use eventghost to trigger the freefilesync batch file both before xbmc starts and when it closes down. the whole processes takes about four seconds, and the xbmc folder in my NAS always remains current.

note, for this to work your media directories must have the same paths across all machines. i map network drives to z: for videos and q: for music. no muss, no fuss, and everything remains current.

i do anticipate that this might not work too well if you have multiple instances of xbmc running at the same time, but even then freefilesync makes it very easy to fix problems when they arise.