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Hi,
each time I upgrade XBMC I am faced with the same horrible task.. I have 5 Xbox's in my house all looking at the same central server where all of the movies, music and photos are stored. I don't upgrade the versions until IMDB change their site and the lookup movie information changes because it is such a nightmare to get A: a compiled version B: a version that plays my media without freezing or choppy audio/video C: go into my new version on 5 systems and redo all of the thumbnails and IMDB information for some 500 movies (exponentially - 2500 IMDB lookups!!.:mad:
So my question is this - Is there a version of XBMC out there that allows me to provide within the config file a parameter to define where each system should look for the thumbnails directory and the database that holds all of the IMDB information for the movies that I have? If not - then can I simply carry out the IMDB work after installing a new version on one xbox and then go in and copy the thumbnails directory and the DB across to the other 4 xbox's using ftp? If so - where do I copy them from on the new upgrade and put them in the other 4?
By the way - does anybody know which version is the most stable now? I tried a few versions and they are playing my videos really poorly - unwatchable. Also my photos have never been able to display (takes a long time to get one photo - I think this may be a caching problem.. each photo is around 2mb).
thanks
Wayne
ps - my usrname used to be wayne186 and I can not reset the password - so here I am.. wayne4186 aka wayne186 :-)
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I have 4 XBMC xboxes. I just recently finished ripping my dvd collection to H.264 and copied the 600 movies onto one of my D-Link DNS 323 servers. I have another DNS 323 for TV shows, music and photos.
Anyway I kinda already have centralised thumbnails because I don't use the IMDB coverart thumbnails. Instead I used a neat little applet called eckes mediaicon downloader. You just point it to the movie folder and it imports the list of movies. You double click the movie, the applet searches mediaicons.org for the relevent tilted dvd thumbnails (much nicer then imdbs). You double click on the icon you want and it saves it as [moviename].tbn straight into your movie folder. What would have taken a week for my 600 movies if I manually did it through the site took one night. ie 2 double clicks per movie rather than typing the name of the movie into the sites search, clicking through about 4 or 5 screens to get to the icon, followed by save as and retyping the movie name .tbn and then having to delete .png off every single file. This applet was an absolute godsend.
So anyway because the thumnails are central each xbox just has to automatically cache the new ones next time its switched on.
As for the database, I do remember a thread about centralising the database on a server but I think one of the devs reckoned it was either impossible or very messy.
What I do is just do it on one xbox and then just FTP the userdata folder to the other xboxes. I rename the other xboxes userdata folder to userdatabackup incase anything goes wrong. It takes about 20 minutes to ftp across for each xbox but I think that is because I have the full apple movie trailers site cached!!. Probably take a lot less time without all the apple trailer files.
Likewise with an upgrade to a new version. Copy the userdata folder to a new extracted build and then ftp that to each xbox.
All I have to do each time after I do this is go into appearance and video settings and reconfigure for the displays some of which are sd crt and one of which is a 720p projector
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hicaow
Senior Member
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just don't delete the UserData folder when you update and it keeps everything ..
"By the way - does anybody know which version is the most stable now?"
the newest SVN 10100 build works great .. T3CH XBMC 2007-08-26 SVN rev10100 ..
im sure the one tomorrow will work fine as well ..
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i have two questions first i have 5 xboxes running in my system and a pretty big library as well that just gets bigger and bigger and i have to update each xbox manually when anything new is added to the system. so what i would like to do is make one xbox a master where i would manually update it then transfer its library to all the other xboxes in the system the only problem is i dont know what exactly needs to be transfered and where it is located? my second question is if the dvd thumbnail cant be located how do you make one and get it to show up?
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spiff
Team-Kodi Member
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go read the friendly manual. both of your questions are ofc answered in there
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i must be retarded because i still cant figure out how to transfer one library to another after reading the manual several times.can someone atleast point me in a more specific direction.any help will be greatly apprecated.
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spiff
Team-Kodi Member
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use export library or copy the database in userdata/database/myvideos34.db
i'm sure its in there
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The ideal situation for me would be the ability to have the database as a remote MySQL DB connected via ODBC. As with others on here, have multiple xboxes streaming all my content off a couple of central NAS servers and I also have a CentOS based server with MySQL on it. Would be nice if you could set the xbox to use that machine for its database and have the calls running over odbc.
No idea if this is feasible as I haven't had a look at the code to see how the DB calls are handled.
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Hey, i can write that script for you if u like, problem is, how does the script no when u turn the xbox off via the button, you would always need to shutdown the xbox via xbmc.
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It'd be great if it could store the thumbnails either with the files it is representing or some such?
But on a side note.
I'd love to see a central bookmark place.. so if i watch a movie over the network in my front room, and then go to another room i can access where i was... ? is this possible?
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I wrote a script called ResumeX which does what you want on one xbox. But if resumex stored its data on a central server, then it could load the data from any xbox and continue on
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My googling for 'ResumeX script' suggests it resumes the <i>last</i> movie/song played? I was think of just storing the book mark info centrally so i can *choose* to 'see' the bookmarks.. and it shows where i got to downstairs on a another xbox....
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I have two Xboxes set upi nmy house. One upstairs, one downstairs. How is the best way to sync the Libraries/thumbs, etc. . . I seem to have to to scan and update both whenever I add something for the deatils to show up. and I would like to simplify the process.
Is coying one UserData folder an option??
Thanks in advance!
Schnard
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Coco
TheTVDB.com Admin
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Copying the userdata folder would work just fine. As far as I know it's currently the best way to do it as well. There is no way to automaticly sync them.