[jacintech.fire]

@uNiversal,
Very nice...
But what I am asking for is a mechanism to "plug" an object store into XBMC without first mapping the objects intona file-like structure...

[un1versal]

Also please stop crossposting http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=183746 Is a exact duplicate of this.

What you want has to be done in Linux and then XBMC will read whatever. XBMC is and app not a OS.

[jacintech.fire]

Also please stop crossposting http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=183746 Is a exact duplicate of this.

What you want has to be done in Linux and then XBMC will read whatever. XBMC is and app not a OS.

Dude,
Do you even know what an object store is?...
"...One of the design principles of object storage is to abstract some of the lower layers of storage away from the administrators and applications. Thus, data is exposed and managed as objects instead of files or blocks. Objects contain additional descriptive properties which can be used for better indexing or management..."

[un1versal]

Like I said, not here to join discussion, see the setup guide I linked, which should work for you.

[jacintech.fire]

@uNiversal,
So that's a no, right?

[nickr]

its not obvious at all why on earth xbmc would need to support this directly. You can do it on the OS level!
Besides that I really don't see a benefit over a proper raid setup.

It's also not obvious why xbmc needs to support smb or nfs when you can mount smb or nfs shares at the OS level.

[wsnipex]

its not obvious at all why on earth xbmc would need to support this directly. You can do it on the OS level!
Besides that I really don't see a benefit over a proper raid setup.

It's also not obvious why xbmc needs to support smb or nfs when you can mount smb or nfs shares at the OS level.

agreed, but stems mostly from the fact that some of our platforms don't easily support it on the OS level, but especially those often don't have proper local storage. Thats means its a feature many users need, as opposed to 0.001% that _want_ and object store access library.

@OP: feel free to dig up a user space implementation of ceph or whatever, make it compile on all our platforms and add it to our VFS layer.

[Milhouse]

The advantage of smb and nfs being supported by XBMC is that the same network path can then be used on all platforms - good luck creating a media library accessible by both Windows and Linux clients when the smb path on Windows would be E:\movies (or a \\UNC) but on Linux the same path, mounted as cifs, might be /mnt/movies. So it makes a lot of sense supporting smb and nfs given the platform neutral nature of XBMC.

However even with RADOS/ceph, the objects in the object store would appear as regular files to applications because that's what applications deal with - files, not objects. Plugging a ceph driver into XBMC might be a solution allowing objects to be accessed natively (assuming this is even desirable and doesn't break a lot of other stuff), until that is the next person comes along wanting a different object storage solution based on something other than RADOS/ceph (we'll probably need to wait a very long time for that next person to show up, however).

To me, this entire object store requirement is absolute overkill rather than address the mistakes made when setting up the storage solution in the first place. The thread has been almost comical, so thanks for that, it really made my Sunday!

[jacintech.fire]

@MilhouseVH,
Back in grade five, when I finally got my hands on a copy of Albert Einstein's paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" (his first paper on what later would be called the Special Theory of Relativity), I remember thinking to myself, "Why is this guy so revered?, this theory, while insightful, does not really feature any new discoveries; on the contrary,it is almost enterely based in the work of others...

What I failed to recognize at the time, was that Einstein's genius was his ability to "connect the dots". He managed to, based on the work of many others, draw conclusions that changed the way we think about the universe; and the laws that govern the innerworkings of the universe (or its personification thereof, i. e. God).

You guys have been so consumed in proving that support for an Object Store "Native Driver" (or API Hook)  is wrong an unecessary that you failed to recognize the possibilities were XBMC to support such a mechanism.
Think about this: What would happen if XBMC did? What would be possible? I dare you to think...

[prawnee]

Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.

[leepenny]

I must say - sick set up but do you really have 512 tb of data with no redundancy ?
How many drives do you lose per annum...........
I worry about my 45 tb set up (using unraid) and the costs of failing hard drives.....
(not happened yet) but man I would hate the complications of all that data and keeping on top of it - is it your full time job..............

[Legdiian]

I dare you to think...

Coming from the guy that is using powerline adapters because he didn't have the foresight to properly pre-wire his "brand new home", that statement is pretty funny. Coming from the guy that didn't do any research before setting up a 128 disk array in the worst way possible, that statement is hilarious.

[jacintech.fire]

@Legdiian,
Seriously, Dude??!!!
What if the house, although new; was already built at the time of purchase....?
What if, while the house was wired to support Gigabit Ethernet; the wall jjacks are north-facing; while the Lady of the house decorated the room to be South, or West facing?
What if, at 23Mbps (versus 63-70Mbps with Gigabit Ethernet) a 500Mbps Powerline adapter gives you enough performace (it is capable of streaming anything but uncompressed BluRay at that speed) to render all other arguments moot?

SERIOUSLY, DUDE?

Funny thing, Some of these disks have been spinning for the past 3 1/2 years, through power outages, system cash and all the rest.....still ticking...
A simple shell script and a cron jobs tells me if there is anything wrong, down to the server, bay and drive in question. Before finishing that rack, the system had been up and running, non-stop, in various way for over serven months...

[Milhouse]

512TB of storage, split across 128 disks (with no redundancy, why?!). Each 4TB disk is further split into 1TB partitions (why?!!) so that's 1024 partitions in all. Each partition is a separate media source (WHY?!!!)

To quote: "the sources.xml file is rather large".

Lol, I should imagine that's the understatement of this year!

I dare you to think...

Perhaps if you'd heeded your own advice you wouldn't have created this monstrosity, which has got to be the most botched solution imaginable. No wonder you're trying to find a software solution to get you out of this mess. Good luck with that... doing it right in the first place would have been so much easier, but then you're a child genius so what do we know, eh?

[jacintech.fire]

I must say - sick set up but do you really have 512 tb of data with no redundancy ?
How many drives do you lose per annum...........
I worry about my 45 tb set up (using unraid) and the costs of failing hard drives.....
(not happened yet) but man I would hate the complications of all that data and keeping on top of it - is it your full time job..............

What complications? There is a MYSQL database that indexs the entire library. If I loose a partition, or a whole drive a simple SQL query will tell me what I am missing. For example, if I loose a partition; let say Media Server #1, Multi-Media Drive #9;

SELECT c22 from movie where c22 like '%Media Server #1 Multi-Media Drive #9%' order by ASC
Will tell me Exactly what I am missing. Since I keep more than one copy of most media, I can either remove these entries from the library, or rebuild it...all the while, the rest of the system keeps on working...

---

512TB of storage, split across 128 disks (with no redundancy, why?!). Each 4TB disk is further split into 1TB partitions (why?!!) so that's 1024 partitions in all. Each partition is a separate media source (WHY?!!!)

To quote: "the sources.xml file is rather large".

Lol, I should imagine that's the understatement of this year!

I dare you to think...

Perhaps if you'd heeded your own advice you wouldn't have created this monstrosity, which has got to be the most botched solution imaginable. No wonder you're trying to find a software solution to get you out of this mess. Good luck with that... doing it right in the first place would have been so much easier, but then you're a child genius so what do we know, eh?

It is easier than you think: Once a drive or partition is full (or reaches a predetermined point) is locked out and I don't even have to think about it:

There is a utility that tells me the storage level of each drive, so when is time to add new media, already know where is going.

and using the JASON API I can trigger a per directory library update...

That same utility does a full library update every week just in case...
I even get a message when my favoirite shows are available and ready...

The whole thing is so easy, my eight year old daughter does most of the media admin stuff...