[jasoft]

After reading through the wiki, various other how-to sites, the thousands of pages from google searches I have some questions which hopefully the developers may answer.

My set up

Zyxel NSA310 box, with all my media on it, shared through NFS
Main media centre Ubuntu 13.10 with vdpau xbmc 13 alpha 12 - long story, ati card now works great.
PC - Arch linux with xbmc 12.3.
Raspberry pi with xbian running xbmc 12.2

Okay, I had a mysql database that used to update with all our media across the network fine, played and resume functions working fine, after upgrading to xbmc 13 the database numbers changed so now the media player updates but all the earlier versions cannot read the database (number to high), I knew this would happen.

So my questions.

1. Why is there a number change on every new version of xbmc, so that it is not backwards compatiable with earlier versions.
2. Why does the name tag in the advancedsettings file do nothing, yes it will use a different name but then adds a number to it and creates a new database so a complete waste of time.

I cannot update xbian from 12.2 as that's down to them. I can update Arch to 13, but why bother and yes I can downgrade my other media centre from 13 to 12.3 but then I will have graphic card issues.

So to finish, if there is no way of either modifing xbmc so that a newer version can be forced to use an older database number, or forcing older versions to use a higher database number, is there any other way to accomplish this. Any help on this would be appreciated as it annoying the hell out of me, ie moving away from xbmc and finding another solution which I would rather not do.

[Martijn]

Then you didn't read enough. But let me tell it again for the thousand time.

The versions are database scheme changes are needed for fixes/improvements.
The number is needed to specify which version you use.
No you cannot force to use a specific version or mix old and new.

Annoying or not you got to live with it. Either run the same versions or don't use mysql. The wiki pages have a clear warning on them.

[jasoft]

Thanks for the reply Martijn, I did read very carefully, and that's not the problem. My issue is with the fact that the mysql option is great if you have more than one media centre in the house, as I do. Cant this option not be included as say an addon, that can be updated on previous versions, so that when your in a situation like me, and can't update a particular machine, the functionality doesn't go out of the window.

I appreciate that changes need to be made, updates applied and the like, but I feel that this part of the system is treated more as an after-thought that is fixed / updated because it's there but not really improved.

I would be interested to know what changes are applied, how different is say version 75 of the video database compared with say version 77. I have some programming and database experience as would like to see if there is a home fix I can apply in some way to sort this out.

Any help you can offer would be great.

[negge]

Thanks for the reply Martijn, I did read very carefully, and that's not the problem. My issue is with the fact that the mysql option is great if you have more than one media centre in the house, as I do. Cant this option not be included as say an addon, that can be updated on previous versions, so that when your in a situation like me, and can't update a particular machine, the functionality doesn't go out of the window.

There is always a way to upgrade a client. If there are no pre-made packages you can always compile it yourself (granted it probably takes a whole night to do it on the Raspberry Pi).

I appreciate that changes need to be made, updates applied and the like, but I feel that this part of the system is treated more as an after-thought that is fixed / updated because it's there but not really improved.

It can't be improved, all that XBMC does is use MySQL instead of filesystem-based SQLite databases. The fact that you can't share a database between two applications that require different versions of said database is just a fact of life.

I think that starting from Gotham it's possible to share libraries over uPnP, they're working out the kinks at the moment. That should hopefully be a more simple replacement for many of MySQL's use cases.

I would be interested to know what changes are applied, how different is say version 75 of the video database compared with say version 77. I have some programming and database experience as would like to see if there is a home fix I can apply in some way to sort this out.

You can inspect the source code to see what has changed. Sometimes it is something minor, like an index being added or dropped, sometimes it's something major like a new column is added.

As every so often on this forum this is a manifestation of the "XY problem" where you're trying to fix the symptom (make XBMC work with the wrong database version) rather than the problem (that you're unable to upgrade all your clients).