[PatrickBateman]

Hi,

I have a small question, here's the set up.
Xbmc 11 on a revo,
win 7,
USB drives as storage.

Xbmc on the revo has these drives added sources as they are connected directly to this machine.
Everything works perfectly and as expected.

Bedroom,
laptop,
win xp,
Xbmc 11
No sources...

Can I point xbmc from the bed room to xbmc in the living room and allow the bedroom xbmc to access the sources that the living room xbmc has attached to it without setting up seperate shares etc?

Basically, allowing the bedroom xbmc to access these sources via the living rooms xbmc install. But can this be done without disrupting the xbmc in the living room so that I can still watch a movie, while the kids watch a cartoon.

Or am I required to set up shares, access, rights etc...

So basically,
Can I use a xbmc box with usb drives attached as my main server and then, use remote clients from around the house (laptops with xbmc) so view the living rooms database, soruces etc and then view these movies just by pointing those client installs to the living rooms install?

Air view works in a similar way, you add the server, add what drives you want to access around the house, then load up the air view client and it connects and let's you view these drives and you can then stream movies etc. no shares, rights, no grief

Can/will xbmc allow me to do something similar?

Thanks in advance.

[kricker]

You could share the libraries from the main XBMC install over UPnP, but you will only have access to items that are scraped in the libraries and not the sources themselves. See settings/network/services. If an item is not in the library, you will not see it on the remote XBMC installs. Otherwise you need to setup Windows shares and have separate libraries on each XBMC install. You could also go the mySQL route to have all XBMC use the same library, but that is way beyond no grief.

[PatrickBateman]

You could share the libraries from the main XBMC install over UPnP, but you will only have access to items that are scraped in the libraries and not the sources themselves. See settings/network/services. If an item is not in the library, you will not see it on the remote XBMC installs. Otherwise you need to setup Windows shares and have separate libraries on each XBMC install. You could also go the mySQL route to have all XBMC use the same library, but that is way beyond no grief.

Interesting,
Cheers Kricker, that's good info...

So the UPnP setup, is there a simple effective way to achieve this (click, click, done) method that sounds like it could be a winner for what I need!

[thesuffering]

I'd take the time to setup MySQL. Once done its as simple as copy and pasting (or creating) the small advancedsettings.xml file into your userdata folder for each computer you want to access the shared database

[PatrickBateman]

Hey,
Yea I checked out the MySQL guide but it's so long and laborious.

A simple "click, click done" method would be more useful for me, my iPad for example can access all the same sources using Airview, it was literally, run, next, next, point to source, done.

Soooo simple, so effective, so easy. This even allows me to set up access via 3G should I wish. All that in 3 clicks I'm in!

That even transcodes the video on the fly as well. Something as simple as this for xbmc would be better for me in all honesty.

If I can do a "share database with other xbmc clients" and have xbmc serve that out to other xbmc clients around the home in a few clicks then great, if not I probably won't do it as its not that essential. Shame really

Just would be useful for the kids getting access to the movies etc.

[kricker]

Try the UPnP sharing and see how it works for you. I told you how to enable It in the post above. Once enabled, you go to the client XBMCs and add the shared libraries as sources. It is just a few clicks. Very simple.

The XBMC devs understand users want an easier server/client setup. Discussion and work on how to best achieve this are ongoing

[harbingerofdoom]

its actually pretty simple to just set up the content folders as shared folders and add those as sources on the other machines.... its how i do it and it makes the process pretty simple when you are setting up multiple xbmc installs. the libraries will not be shared and will be specific to each xbmc install but i actually prefer that anyway to be honest.

the transcoding stuff i have never had to worry about...even on my android i use apps that have native support for the file formats that i have on the server end.

[PatrickBateman]

Cheers Kricker, I'll give it a shot