Share thumbnails from smb share

Ive got my xbmc's throughout the house synced and now Im looking to share one thumbnail folder that I want to host on the smb share. Can I just copy the thumbnail folder from one of the xbmc machines, place it on my smb server, share the folder and add the path exception pointing to the thumbnail folder share to advancedsettings.xml?

Will this then create a thumbnail fo reach item upon scraping and share it across my xbmc systems?

Yes. Note that I do not recommend this as it will slow things down significantly. But there isn't really an elegant alternative as yet.

I second this. I setup thumbnail sharing (and other userdata stuff) off my NAS just for kicks and it slows things down a hell-uv-a-lot.

Even over a gig network all hardwired?

---

Ok so i there another way to keep thumbnails updated on all machines by keeping them local?

I have mine over smb, its certainly not as quick as hosting them locally - but its not unacceptable.

Currently no easy / simple way of keeping cache's in sync on multiple machines. Shared thumbs folder is the best option currently available.

Yep, even over a gig network. It has to pull all your thumbnails (and fanart) from the network everytime. Much slower than from local disk. It isn't slow as in * takes 10 seconds to load each image *.... It is just nowhere near as snappy as from local disk. Very noticeable.

See here for how Thumbnail cache works: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=ThumbnailCache

You can copy your current MAIN xbmc thumbnail cache to your other devices. Each xbmc device will keep its own local copy of the thumbnail cache (these will not be in sync, but it shouldn't matter as they will each update as required).

jmarshall or someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

That page isn't completely accurate. In Eden, Music and Video thumbs do _not_ hit the texture cache (Textures*.db) at all.

Ok last question. If i leave the thumbnails on each pc when i update the library shared by the server on one pc wont i get a conflict when i update the others?

Alright I went ahead and tested it both ways and where I notice a slight delay is opening the movie category it takes about 3 seconds to load my titles (Only about 700) so I can see where a larger library may become more delayed.

When running the shared library and keeping thumbs on the local machines I had a problem getting the artwork on more than one xbmc machine. If I updated machine a's library it got the artwork but machine b and c didnt and I couldnt just update their libraries to recover it. Only thing I could figure was to remove the title and readd it but that defeated the purpose of sharing a databases.

What I really wanted to achieve was multiple xbmc clients pulling videos from a windows server that when I update one they all update and keep the same movie set structures etc. Change one library and they all sync exactly the same. This way Im not doing triple the work to get them all the same.

For me the 3 second delay is totally worth not having to manage more than 1 library. Hopefully theres a better way in the future but if not I'll deal with the delay. If anyone has a way to sync the thumbs easily locally on each machine (like a "get missing thumbs" script) let me know please.

I use a similar setup, sharing a massive library (3000 movies, 10.000 tv eps) over a NFS share on my linux server, the slowdown is defiantly noticeable but still acceptable.

An idea that spins my mind, is to sync the thumbnailcache to each client via rsync on startup, this way you would only sync diffs which should be finished in a second. just some bash script which you run on startup and shutdown. You might still have some gap with clients that you swich off and on inbetween updates but this depends on your setup.

will give it a shot next time I find some time. (excludes non linux clients of course)