Linux How to access media over the internet via XBMC
#1
Hello - initially I would like to be able to access my XBMC library when I'm away from home and then eventually give friends and family access.

I currently have my media on mirrored raid drives on an 8 core xeon with 16GB RAM on debian. This is backed up to an offline server. I have a 19Mb/s upload speed, maybe about 14Mb/s during peak times. So hardware wise I should be able to handle multiple connections and streams.

I've just converted my library over to MySQL and I'm thinking next step is to install apache. And I then believe I have two choices I can either create a VPN to the server, so it just appears to be on the local lan. XBMC should then easily connect to it. However, I don't want friends and family slowing my network down with non media related traffic. So can XBMC start up and shut down a VPN connection on launch?

Or is that unnecessary, can XBMC recognise a public ip address:port / samba location?

Or is there a better method of accessing my media over the net using XBMC?

A couple additional questions, can I at certain times, re-encode on the fly all 1080p content down to 720p to reduce network traffic?

Also if the server is down or can not be accessed for any reason I don't want the "media not found, do you want to remove this from the database" option to come up? How should I be handling that?

I want each user to have there own profile with watched statuses and for me still to be able to access my profile from anyway.

Any thoughts?
Linux 3.5.0-22-generic
Ubuntu 12.10 - XBMCbuntu quantal
Skin: Aeon Nox
CPU: Intel Celeron G1610 2.60GHz
GPU: Enhanced Intel HD Graphics 2000/3000
RAM: 2GB
SSD: 32GB
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#2
RhysGM Wrote:I've just converted my library over to MySQL and I'm thinking next step is to install apache. And I then believe I have two choices I can either create a VPN to the server, so it just appears to be on the local lan. XBMC should then easily connect to it. However, I don't want friends and family slowing my network down with non media related traffic. So can XBMC start up and shut down a VPN connection on launch?

You should first decide if you want to give general access to your media or if they should be able to add your library as a source so they can use it from within XBMC. In the first case you can use something like XBMC Video Server.

If on the other hand your clients use XBMC then the best way would be to setup an OpenVPN server and deal out client configurations for those who intend to connect to you. You can then share your files using Samba/NFS. The fastest option is most likely to use FTP as a source since it has the least overhead.

Quote:A couple additional questions, can I at certain times, re-encode on the fly all 1080p content down to 720p to reduce network traffic?

That is not possible at the moment.

Quote:Also if the server is down or can not be accessed for any reason I don't want the "media not found, do you want to remove this from the database" option to come up? How should I be handling that?

Only if you share the database.
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#3
I do this with free plex server version that can also transcode but needs windows from server side and in xbmc I have the plex video addon
There's no substitute for experience
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#4
(2014-03-10, 16:51)negge Wrote:
RhysGM Wrote:A couple additional questions, can I at certain times, re-encode on the fly all 1080p content down to 720p to reduce network traffic?

That is not possible at the moment.

Not from within XBMC, but if you know the name of the file(s) you want to re-encode, you can install HandBrakeCLI and then use a command such as

HandBrakeCLI -i ~/path/to/original_file.mpg -o ~/path/to/compressed_file.mp4 -e x264 -q 20.0 -r 29.97 –pfr –crop 0:0:0:0 -l 720 -w 1280

which, according to this article, will compress a 720p or 1080p source file significantly, producing a 720p output and only 2-channel stereo sound.

So I suppose you could set up a bash script to re-encode all the files in a particular directory, and then run that from a cron job. Not what I would consider easy, but at least possible.
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