Configuring XBMC

Hey guys, I'm new to XBMC. Lately I've been trying to configure XBMC so that it works the way I want it to. Sadly, this has been a bit more tricky than I hoped for. I've tried searching the forum for threads describing a similar set up, but I haven't found any, so I thought I'd make a new thread.

Let me explain the situation. We are five friends living together, and we all have a computer of our own in our rooms. In the livingroom there's a HTPC which has XBMC up and running. On this computer we store all the media. What I want to accomplish is for all of us to be able to use XBMC in our own rooms and get access to the library that's available on the HTPC, while at the same time having separate metadata (so that we all have our own "watched/not watched" etc.). And when the library on the HTPC is updated with new media, this new media is also automaticly available on the other computers. The tricky part is that I also want each of us to be able to log on to the already configured XBMC on the HTPC, so that the XBMC we log on to in our rooms have the same add-ons installed, same skin etc.. This way we don't have to manually install every add-on, skin etc. on each computer. The main reason that I need it to work like this, is because my friends are relativly clueless when it comes to computer related topics that doesn't involve surfing, so they just need it to work "out of the box". Is it possible to set up XBMC to work like this?

If you need any additional information, please let me know. I don't know if I explained the situation very clearly, but I hope you understand what I'm trying to accomplish anyway... Any help will be greatly appreciated!

I need to ask if all room have a tv in or are the computer monitors going to act as the viewing area in the room?

Im guessing you can set that one computers hard drive to a network then let all computers have access to it from xbmc or do upnp

Harro: Beside the livingroom, there's a TV in two other rooms. So computer monitors will be used in three rooms, and a TV will be used in the two remaining rooms.

sal995: By using UPnP, how would that work exactly? I read the summary of the UPnP-page on the XBMC-wiki. Quote from the wiki: "The drawback is that an upnp Server only sends metadata and so it is not possible to integrate the upnp shares into the XBMC library. ". Doesn't that mean that you can't use those kind of shares in the XBMC library?

i would start off using openelec as the OS/XBMC install this is as close to a appliance like feel you turn it on it takes between 20-30 secs to boot and goes straight into xbmc without any other interaction

i personally have mine setup so all my pc's have a central database which is on the server in my home office so all watched is sync's between my 3 HTPC's for your task i am not sure how other than just trying path substitutions that you can share the same metadata, etc... without syncing watched/unwatched stats you could also create individual profiles on each machine for that person you then could customize if wanted each machine to each person's style and tast

I hope I am understanding your question correctly

I use XBMCubuntu on a thumb drive (make sure you set it to "Persistence" when you format), set bios on computer to boot from USB as an option, I use this software to create the bootable file "Universal-USB-Installer-1.8.9.8". There is an option in the software to select XBMCubuntu.


The "Persistence" setting shows up after you select the XBMC iso file, it will be a slider that will allow you to select how large you want it to be.

Next put thumb drive in computer after changing the bios, boot it, system will boot directly into XBMC, create all your "File Shares" and you are done.

I hope this is what you are looking for.

protocol77: I already have Windows 7 installed on the machine, as I need to run programs that runs only/best on Win7, Silverlight among other things. Yes, I've been thinking that a central database and using profiles might be the answer. But I don't really know how to make it work like I describe. I would like to have seperate metadata for each machine. How do you choose not to sync metadata?

dladrach: No offence, but if I'm not misunderstanding you entirely, I don't really see how that relates to my problem... :/

download the XBMCBackup add-on,for your all ready set xbmc on comp #1, set your remote path in the ad-on's configuration page, then back it up...now install xbmc with the xbmcbackup add-on on the other comps and just restore your back up to them...you should now have all your add-ons, settings and everything else available...you may have to set your media from the network now...there are different ways to do this...a simple network share, samba, SQL...but that's more a subject of opinion.

I am new to XBMC also but I have a similar setup that you mentioned.

I have 3 separate setups of XBMC, one that can only be viewed on a laptop and 2 windows 7 htpc's connected to 2 TVs. They all access media via a File Server / NAS and each XBMC instance captures its own metadata in the current setup, so box 1 doesn't maintain resumes, watched, new, etc. from the other setups.

Let me know if I have this straight as I am new but I would have to setup a SQL database to have the above data shared to all the systems.

So having a central file server should allow each of your setups to maintain their own metadata. Also when I add any new media to the file server it populates to all the other boxes.

With MySQL you can have different profiles with different watch statuses, but that will require multiple MySQL DBs, which is easy to set up (using <name> in the MySQL settings) but will mean that those DBs won't be Synced. Meaning that if you add a movie, you will have to make sure it's added for each profile (which shouldn't be an issue if XBMC updates library on start up and the file is named correctly).

Syncing other things starts to get tricky. Outside of what is mentioned in the "Syncing other parts" in the MySQL guide, there's not a whole lot that you would want to store on a file server, so you'd want to sync those things using some kind of automated file copy. Even then, there will be things that you can't sync, like guisettings.xml, which contains settings specific to the exact size of the display being used (among other things).

If it were me, I would just worry about setting up the library sharing, and occasionally updating each XBMC install manually for other things like add-ons and any kind of special settings (when you think about it, those don't really change very often)