Server-side or dropbox+symbolic link watched?

I use the watch checkmarks to keep track of my progress in television shows, due to my general choice in television time being as I am falling asleep.

I recently purchased a laptop in addition to my desktop, and I was wondering if I could keep these checkmarks synchronized between the two. All my videos are on a samba share that the desktop and laptop connect to, exactly the same way and with the exact same paths, in case that's important. Both the laptop and desktop are on 64bit Windows 7 home premium, and running the latest xbmc.

I already use a mix of Dropbox and Link Shell Extension to keep my video game saves syncronized, and I was wondering if I could do the same with what episodes I've watched already. If it's as simple as synchronizing a file, just tell me the path please. If I can have the file simply saved on my server instead of the clients, tell me how please. If neither, well, let's see if we can figure this out.

Why not MySQL?

Sorry, I'm not following. I know what MySQL is, but not sure what you're suggesting.

The watched flags are stored in the XBMC database. By default this uses SQLLite format and is stored in %APPDATA%\xbmc\database (APPDATA is an environment variable and will be something like C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming. You could just copy the database between the PCs, but don't do it when XBMC is running!

An alternative is to store the database centrally using a MySQL server. Then all the clients use the single MySQL database. I think the MySQL support is currently "experimental" so there's no official guide for it yet, but see http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Adv...atabase.3E for basic instructions.

JR

Okay. I assume I also NEVER want to have them both running at the same time if using the same database?

Thanks for the help, trying now.

Veovis Wrote:Okay. I assume I also NEVER want to have them both running at the same time if using the same database?

If you're using MySQL you can have any number of the clients running, because the database is designed to be shared. If you're using the built in database then you can't share it because it sits on the hard drive of the PC. You can copy the database between PCs, but don't do this is XBMC is running because the database files will be locked.

JR

Roger that. Due to less hassle, I'm having Dropbox sync the database for right now. If it means that I can use both machines for XBMC at the same time however, I'll set aside a free day or two to see if I can get MySQL running on the server that has my media on it.

Thanks for the help, and I can confirm that the Dropbox method works. I checked ("watched") a whole bunch of television shows, closed out, and started the other machine's copy of XBMC. Everything I had done was synchronized within a few seconds.

The symbolic link option in the TITLE was never discussed here. (me thinks?)

I am interested in having multiple users who log into Windows 7 machine all have the same XBMC settings, so that no matter who logs into the machine, they are always seeing the same info.
The media is all stored on a shared NAS accessible to all IDS.

Thought I'd set up symlinks to one master user profile

MASTER C:\Users\<master_user>\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\
SYLNK1 C:\Users\<user1>\AppData\Roaming\XBMC to above
SYLNK2 C:\Users\<user2>\AppData\Roaming\XBMC to above

I also took master_user \Roaming\XBMC\ directory and modified permissions to allow MACHINE\Users group Write permissions, so all can update.

Has anyone had issues with this setup?

I have placed my entire XBMC directory into my Dropbox folder. Then I run XBMC in portable mode (xbmc.exe -p)
It keeps all user settings (database, thumbs etc) in %XBMC%\portable_data\*

Everything is synced between sitting room and bedroom XBMC instances.
Another advantage is that when I update the program (I frequently use the nightly builds), the updates get pushed to each instance too.

I've seen Dropbox used with symlinks before but I don't think I've seen anyone mention placing the whole folder in there.
(Granted this will only work if all instances are Windows based)

Have you had any problem with the dropbox sync when using more than one instance at the same time? I am interested in looking into this option