[Ned Scott]

There is server code. XBMC contains both server and client code for UPnP.

[steve1977]

There is server code. XBMC contains both server and client code for UPnP.

Ok, but how does it work in "real life"? I currently have three clients. With the latest nightly, will all three act as server and client at the same time or do I need to decide which one is the server? My movies are on a headless server (without XBMC installed on) - will the paths be handed over? Where does the "library file" sits and which of the three clients can "update and clean library"? And last but not least, can I install the nightly on my headless win7 (with remote desktop access only).

Lots of question - your help hugely appreciated!

[Ned Scott]

You decide one to be "server", and the others will add that XBMC box as a UPnP file source. Currently, XBMC will route the video from the NAS through itself and then out to the other XBMC boxes. The library file sits with the "server/host" XBMC box, and that box is the only one that can update or clean the library. It's probably possible to install XBMC on your headless win7 machine (at least, I don't see why it wouldn't work).

Keep in mind, in the future our full MySQL replacement will likely have other methods as well, so it might not all work like how UPnP currently works. UPnP is simply just one option, and one that is available now.

[steve1977]

Thanks for your quick reply.

Currently, XBMC will route the video from the NAS through itself and then out to the other XBMC boxes.

Not sure whether I am being too negative, but this appears to be a show-stopper for me? When I start routing from NAS to XBMC-server to XBMC-client and then maybe even doing something else with the LAN, then I am basically getting nothing, but buffering. At least when I am talking about large HD files. Or am I missing something?

It's probably possible to install XBMC on your headless win7 machine (at least, I don't see why it wouldn't work).

There are several threads on this topic. I always thought it is a "bug", which would get fixed, but it is more complicated. I never understood what prevents this from working, but several developers aknowledged the issue and shared that there are no plans to change this.

Keep in mind, in the future our full MySQL replacement will likely have other methods as well, so it might not all work like how UPnP currently works. UPnP is simply just one option, and one that is available now.

Looking forward to other options and hope this may even become real for Gotham!!!

[TugboatBill]

It's probably possible to install XBMC on your headless win7 machine (at least, I don't see why it wouldn't work).

There are several threads on this topic. I always thought it is a "bug", which would get fixed, but it is more complicated. I never understood what prevents this from working, but several developers aknowledged the issue and shared that there are no plans to change this.

I have XBMC installed on a headless Win 7 that I use as a server. I have it boot @ ~5PM, scan for new content and update the MySQL gatabase if anything is found, and then shut down. It's a stock eden install, nothing special. If I need to make changes I just RDP in and make them.

[crimsonfury]

I added Plex as my UPnP video files, but they won't add completely to the library. Meaning they won't scan into it and scrape for artwork. Xbmc sees plex server perfectly as a upnp source but won't scrape it in.... What gives?

[topfs2]

Thanks for your quick reply.

Currently, XBMC will route the video from the NAS through itself and then out to the other XBMC boxes.

Not sure whether I am being too negative, but this appears to be a show-stopper for me? When I start routing from NAS to XBMC-server to XBMC-client and then maybe even doing something else with the LAN, then I am basically getting nothing, but buffering. At least when I am talking about large HD files. Or am I missing something?

Correction. It will only proxy it if the client doesn't understand the protocol the nas has. So if you share on smb from A (your NAS) and B is an xbmc with upnp. The C computer which gets the metadata from B will stream from A directly if it understands smb, which if C is xbmc it does.

[aptalca]

I understand xbmc is pushing for having their full client on different platforms, with no compromises, however because of that they are falling behind other alternatives as it takes too much effort to build xbmc on some low power platforms with arm architecture.

100% wrong. The fact that XBMC is not a thin client has nothing to do with the lack of transcoding options. Removing features or making a thin client from scratch does not magically give XBMC transcoding abilities.

We do have devs interested in adding a transcoding server, so maybe someday soon.

Even then, I would argue that this is an apples and oranges comparison. XBMC is primarily a player, not a server.

Plus, transcoding means nothing on platforms that have hardware decoding. You need it to stream from most internet connections, but not because something is ARM based. There is no "power" when it comes to hardware decoding. The CPU isn't used at all. Even Plex gives many devices the option to not use transcoding, even on Android.

Ned, thanks for the reply, but I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. I was trying to make a point that because xbmc is trying to be a full service player on all the supported platforms, transcoding is not absolutely necessary, and therefore is not too high up on the devs' priority lists. But transcoding does provide other advantages that xbmc, as a "player", could greatly benefit from, please see the next paragraph. As for arm, yes you're right that removing features does not give it transcoding abilities. However, having transcoding would allow xbmc devs to build simple thin clients for low power devices. I know that "low power" is not an issue with hardware decoding, but implementing hardware decoding on different arm chipsets by different manufacturers, with different implementations makes it very time consuming to develop an xbmc build compatible with all the devices out there. Trust me, I have been following the libstagefright development closely, even that doesn't work on all android devices, only certain chipsets. Plex on the other hand relies on whatever the device is capable of hardware decoding with minimal effort (mp4/x264 most likely), creates different profiles for different chipsets and manufacturers' firmware (not different than upnp or dlna profiles) and builds thin clients with minimal effort and is ubiquitous.

I do strongly disagree with your statement, "transcoding means nothing on platforms that have hardware decoding", though. For local playback or over lan, yes that would be correct. However for streaming over the internet (remote streaming), transcoding is absolutely necessary due to bandwidth limitations because of insufficient ul/dl rates and/or caps on bandwidth usage. I cannot possibly stream an HD movie over wan.

I do have an android tablet that is capable of decoding every media file I have with xbmc. However, once I leave my house, xbmc on the tablet becomes absolutely useless. Not only I cannot stream my HD media without transcoding, but also I cannot fit a single 1080p movie on the available 8GB of storage space. Through transcoding, I could 1) stream downscaled versions over wan, and/or 1) as in plex sync, I could store downscaled versions of the files for offline/local playback. Movies take up about 1GB, and the quality looks good enough on my tablet screen.

I do not think comparing xbmc and plex is comparing apples to oranges. Considering people use the two for pretty much the same purposes, I think it is fair to compare them head to head. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I think xbmc is miles ahead of plex for at home htpc use, but plex is way ahead for mobile or away-from-the-house use.

Since people are relying on remote use, or use on mobile devices, on the go (or even through a web browser as in plex-web), more and more lately, I see plex usage going up significantly. Many xbmc users, including myself, are forced to use plex on the side. I am afraid some of these users will find it easy to switch to plex for htpc use as well.

XBMC devs have been doing amazing work, and for free, as opposed to plex, being a for profit company with paid employees. I just think that the direction plex took is more in line with the user needs and current and future trends and I just want to say that I don't agree with the xbmc team's decisions on the future direction of the platform.

Maybe the xbmc devs are right, and in the near future, everyone will have Gigabit or faster uncapped internet access, so remote streaming of full HD rips will be possible and the portable devices will have terabytes of flash storage for local media. Then there would be no reason for transcoding. Then xbmc would be in a better position. However, I personally don't think that is the case. Because for one, Comcast and other ISPs are switching to tiered plans with caps, and also 4K media is gaining popularity. So chances are, I will have mostly 4K media on my nas and low bandwidth caps, so I will desperately need transcoding for any remote streaming. Anyway, that's just my perspective.

[Ned Scott]

Plex is able to go in the direction they did because of a few reasons:

1. They're not as big on open source as we are.
2. They have less work to do for core features because they're able to build on top of our platform for the major desktop platforms.
3. They're getting paid.

Plex has already admitted that many of their thin clients suck (hence their revamp of their Android client).

It's Apples and Oranges because Plex has two parts, one part player and one part server. XBMC is agnostic and can be made to work with almost any server. There's actually a number of transcoding servers that do work with XBMC, but they also work with other more native iOS/Android clients, so there's little incentive to make them run smoothly on XBMC. It's also Apples and Oranges because XBMC is not designed for phones and tablets, it's designed for set-top-boxes and the 10 foot interface with local media. It's a case where people are far less likely to need internet streaming from a home connection. Phones and tablets are more of an experimental area for XBMC right now, simply because we get those devices as a side effect of the Android set-top-box efforts. It's like comparing Plex to a DVD player. A DVD player doesn't transmit DVDs over the network, because that's not what it's designed for.

When I watch videos on my laptop I don't normally use XBMC, because it's a 10-foot interface, and I'm 2 feet away from my laptop. I'll use XBMC on my iPad, but mostly for XBMC add-ons that I can't access outside of XBMC (mmm, mobile Hulu without paying for Hulu+). When I want to watch an episode of Conan, I use the Conan app. There's even a 3rd party video player that works with most video formats that is a little easier to use on a touch screen than XBMC (though our touch screen support is improving greatly. You can now map functions to swipes). When I watch videos from my home connection while I'm away, I use a program called Air Video, because it does a fantastic job of transcoding, and it even runs on my old PPC Mac, and handles stylized subtitles for anime.

Plex sacrifices most of the things that makes XBMC great, like the ability to customize the heck out of the interface. I feel that things like that, the powerful customization, rich media layouts, add-on content, and more, are what make XBMC so powerful. If someone is just looking for a simple media player to just play videos, then Plex isn't bad. There are members of Team XBMC who use Plex so they can watch their home library while on the road. So yeah, I think it's Apples and Oranges. It's a different situation when I want to display my media library in my living room in a kick ass set-up, than if I just want to watch something while traveling.

However, none of this really matters to the point that I was trying to make. Nothing, and I can't stress this enough, nothing about the current decisions for XBMC have prevented transcoding server features. Developers work on what they want to work on. If you took away whatever else the devs were working on, that still doesn't mean they would want to work on a transcoding server, simply because they had the time to work on it. There are no meetings where we go "okay, bob is going to work on this, and frank is going to work on that". Team XBMC isn't run that way. It only takes one dev to want to work on it, and all the other devs can not care about the feature at all, but those devs will not prevent the feature from going in simply because they're not interested. If anything, they're likely to help the one dev working on transcoding, simply to be supportive. That first dev still has to happen, though.

And it's looking like that might very well happen, and a lot sooner than we think, but it's not something I know for sure.

[Ned Scott]

Correction. It will only proxy it if the client doesn't understand the protocol the nas has. So if you share on smb from A (your NAS) and B is an xbmc with upnp. The C computer which gets the metadata from B will stream from A directly if it understands smb, which if C is xbmc it does.

Hot dog, we do that now? I thought it was still all funneled through the UPnP server, though I do know that add-on content sends a URL. This is very awesome to find out!

[crimsonfury]

All good points... I do agree that Server/Client with server transcoding is the future for all media centers. Even the new version of "MediaBrowser" is breaking free from WMC and becoming its own client/server media center setup.


But how do we get UPnP to scrape into the xbmc video library? I am only able to add it but it never asks to update the library and won't scrape when I choose to manually update.

[Ned Scott]

Currently, you can't. UPnP provides it's own metadata, and scraping is handled by the XBMC install providing the UPnP source, so it's basically an isolated library. Finding a way to integrate UPnP libraries with the main library is one of those things being looked at now.

[steve1977]

It's probably possible to install XBMC on your headless win7 machine (at least, I don't see why it wouldn't work).

There are several threads on this topic. I always thought it is a "bug", which would get fixed, but it is more complicated. I never understood what prevents this from working, but several developers aknowledged the issue and shared that there are no plans to change this.

I have XBMC installed on a headless Win 7 that I use as a server. I have it boot @ ~5PM, scan for new content and update the MySQL gatabase if anything is found, and then shut down. It's a stock eden install, nothing special. If I need to make changes I just RDP in and make them.

Would be really great if it would work, but there are dozens of threads confirming that it is does not run headless. Please see below one that I had started - two developers (Martijn and kricker) confirmed that it is not working and Martijn (back in Jan/2013) concluded the thread by saying that "It's somewhere on the road but no near future".

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pplication

[steve1977]

Currently, you can't. UPnP provides it's own metadata, and scraping is handled by the XBMC install providing the UPnP source, so it's basically an isolated library. Finding a way to integrate UPnP libraries with the main library is one of those things being looked at now.

Is that relevant to those of us going cross-players with UPnP (Plex/XBMC) or also those of us like me who only use XBMC?

How does artwork/poster caching works? Or will the display be slowed down as it will always need to stream them from the UPnP-Server? What about sorting my library by genre or year? What about video playlists?

[steve1977]

It's also Apples and Oranges because XBMC is not designed for phones and tablets, it's designed for set-top-boxes and the 10 foot interface with local media. It's a case where people are far less likely to need internet streaming from a home connection. Phones and tablets are more of an experimental area for XBMC right now, simply because we get those devices as a side effect of the Android set-top-box efforts. It's like comparing Plex to a DVD player. A DVD player doesn't transmit DVDs over the network, because that's not what it's designed for.

Reading the whole thread and many other threads on this topic, the paragraph above sums it up nicely. XBMC is THE best player for HTPCs and this is what it is designed for. It is emerging to be strong on set-top boxes and this is where its core is.

In my eyes, the tablet and smart phone applications are not priority and not the core of what XBMC really is. For example, there is not even an official iOS based XBMC out by now (the release only works on jailbroken devices). I do not want to start a conversation about Apple/iOS and its policies, but not even haveing an officially approved app for these devices shows that this is not the direction that XBMC currently wants to take.

What does it mean for me - my home is an "XBMC home" and I use itunes for my iOS devices. I don't want to bother with jailbreaking them (which I used to do in the past and always found a pain) and I also don't want to bother with the buggy nature of Plex and the need to harmonize things with XBMC, which is a pain in the neck. Also, I am sceptical about Plex' future (and it appears from the web-site that the LG support has already stopped).