[tedappleberry]

Hello Clever People:
I have been using Couch Potato and Sickbeard for some time and have amassed a nice collection. Been using XBMC to simply to attach via UPNP and do a folder by folder view. Not very pretty at all. I really want to make the browsing experience come alive and I believe XBMC is going to be the best method. Integrate movie pictures, move descriptions, etc in to the video browsing experience the user can more intelligently select a video to view. I live in a big house with a bunch of guys and we are all using this as a media server with XBMC as the client.

I am using a QNAP linux based NAS with MYSQL capabilities. What's the best way to configure this? I want to simply be able to install XBMC on each client and easily configure the same, hopefully have everything done server side. Is there a guide somewhere?

Thanks!

[vinistois]

Its pretty easy, you're 95% of the way there.

Forget UPNP, just make shares on your NAS - you probably already have shares, and enter them in as your 'movies' and 'tv shows' video sources in xbmc. That's it, you're pretty much done! You can all run your own copies of sickbeard/sabnzbd on your own client computers, so everyone can download what they want, and just setup sickbeard to move and rename them into the common shares on the NAS upon completion.

If its a bunch of guys, I would keep your libraries separate so you all have your own 'watched' statuses and whatnot. The alternative is to sync all your libraries using an sql database on the NAS so that each xbmc instance is sharing a common library. But honestly sometimes it seems like half the support threads on this forum are about SQL database nonsense... just skip it. If you are scanning the same library with the same version of XBMC using the same scraper, the same data will be in the libraries anyways. The only thing that won't sync is the watched statuses. But for me, I wouldn't want some show to not show up in my watchlist just because my roommate already watched it. Right?