But don't we still need path sub in advanced settings as per this post:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1121164
(2012-06-06, 16:11)john.doe Wrote: You will still need path substitution.
The difference is that there's no longer any relationship between the path to the video file and what thumbnail is assigned. This means that as long as the two XBMC libraries used the same web URL for their image, they'll both share the same thumbnail hash, regardless of whether the media path is /storage/media/movies/somemovie.avi or /mnt/NetworkDrive/movies/somemovie.avi. This means that there's no duplication of thumbnail data when moving files around or accessing them from different paths to the same file, since the hash is now based on the web URL and remains the same. That's one of the changes it brings. Less duplication of data. Another (even bigger) benefit is that when you're scrolling through lists of remote images, it's able to easily crc32() the URLs and see if a locally cached version already exists. Previously, when the thumbnails were named after the video filename hash, that wasn't possible; but now, with the URL-based hashes, it's easy to check if we already have a locally cached version of any URL we've previously downloaded, by simply hashing the desired URL and looking for that pre-cached filename in the Thumbnails folder.
However, to sync multiple libraries or share libraries, you'll still need <pathsubstitution> (http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Path_substitution) and thumbnail path sharing to ensure that paths are normalized across platforms, in order to actually be able to ACCESS the media that the library references. I.e. the local library might refer to /storage/movies/coolmovie.avi, and you're accessing that library over a network which can find that file at /mnt/netstorage/movies/coolmovie.avi; so you'd use a path substitution for your network client to be able to translate those local paths in the library to the relevant network-paths.
An even simpler, non-synced case that also benefits from these changes is when you're having two nearly independent XBMC installations. A local one and a networked one.
* Local one: has a thumbnail cache and has all the media on its own local disk.
* The networked one: uses <pathsubstitution> to replace "special://masterprofile/Thumbnails/" with a writable network path to the thumbnail cache folder of the XBMC installation above, as well as scanning all media from a shared folder on the network.
In this setup, they'd share thumbnail caches, meaning that they don't have to re-download thumbnails that the other has already downloaded. However, they'd be independent in all other ways and would not know about each others library data, actual thumbnail assignments, etc. All they'd do is share media files and thumbnail cache to save some time.
So, no, you still need pathsubstitution just as much as before, but there's now much less data duplication no matter how you look at it.
I updated my MBP and my ATV2 to nightly today, and dumped my libraries so I could start fresh.
All of my media (Movies and TV) is stored in separate folders with .tbn , .nfo and fanart folders etc. on my QNAP NAS.
I use shared database with MySQL server running on the QNAP.
Everything shared using NFS.
Seeing as the MBP is a lot faster than the ATV2 I did the library scanning using XBMC on it. This was fast and painless due to my previously mentioned setup.
But, without the pathsubstitution in advancedsettings.xml no images / thumbnails would show up.
I had to copy to the MBP thumbnails folder to the QNAP, then enable the path subs I previously had with Eden on both the MBP and ATV2. Only then was all good with the world again.
The ATV2 took a while to load the images on first run, I had to gradually move through the Movies database to get the images to show up. I guess they were all caching locally on the ATV2. After first run it's definitely quicker than with Eden.
So, have I missed something entirely or have I set this up correctly?