In my pursuit of the ideal setup for myself, I wanted storage for my data I could share on my local network and access outside of my LAN. I also wanted this server to shutdown completely when not accessed and wake from a cold boot when needed. I wanted the best streaming ability available since SMB wasn't working for modern size files anymore and installing ethernet cable all over the place was out of the question. So a decent router was included.
Then I needed something for playback. I used the internal player on the TV for a while but it was primitive and as my movie collection grew, cataloging became impossible. MCE with MediaBrowser was ok but limited. Then I discovered XBMC. A whole new world opened and I caught the bug. So my playback was going to be via a PC through an A/V reciever. A windows PC because I know nothing about Linux and code and SSH and so on and learning was overly complicated for my needs.
I also needed a PC to run small business's, surf, email, home automation and run countless windows softwares for other adventures and then was introduced to audio/video editing. Getting a backed up 3D Blu-Ray to render from file properly was a whole new challenge so the chip was an i7.
In my mind I was going to need a whole bunch of devices which were blends of Windows and Linux. I bought a Raspberry Pi to practice. Afterall, all the forum talk was about Linux based NAS and NFS. There was nothing much about Windows and NFS. So, I embarked on a mission. I'm cheap. Not only did I want everything ecomomically, I wanted my electricity usage kept at a minimum and didn't want tons of equipment stuffed everywhere. The heat generated in my theatre room would also be an issue as well as the noise. That's when I decided to build 1 silent box that did everything and being naive about anything outside of Windows, it was all going to be Windows based.
Enter a modified silverstone htpc case with (9) 4TB HDD's and an SSD, then install the hardware, W7 O/S, etc. Add the modem/router, the TV, and the AVR. Plug in a few USB devices like a printer, some X-10 stuff, and a 10 bay port duplicator for backup and it was time to make it all work.
In the end, I was left with 1 problem. XBMC can playback a 2D iso on a client but not 3D. So any streamed 3D iso will only playback in 2D. So I would stream to an external player triggered by XBMC batch files but it would need to be mounted on a virtual drive and there is the problem. A client served by Hanewin NFS for windows can't map a drive letter and without it there is nothing to mount. So, client devices are limited to 2D playback. Can Alegro do this? I'm writing this and my prior 'book' not to hijack this thread but to confirm there are many ways to skin a cat others might find of interest. I see some talented individuals here that I don't run across often and thought you might be able to shed some light on this problem other than serve from linux etc. Feel free to PM me and if this post is too far off the thread subject it deserves to be removed and I'm ok with that. I feel because this libnfs problem would not exist if not for Windows users, the post describes the importance of it for at least 1 user.
Now my client devices have a new 2nd problem. Artwork or title count due to this libnfs conflict. I thought the custom build
http://mirrors.xbmc.org/test-builds/win3...ewin32.exe put everything back to normal at the time I tested it. I installed it again this morning on top of the latest nightly and it didn't work. I get the correct title count, artwork loads for newly scanned items, but existing items show no artwork unless I manually refresh them from the info tab. The newest nightly wouldn't refresh at all and newly scanned items showed nothing either. I suppose I could delete AppData\Roaming\XBMC\userdata\Database folder, but it would take hours to rebuild. Is it worth trying or is this build already deemed non-op? Fwiw, I did install this custom build on top of what was the current nightly when it was made available and all was well. No idea what changed other than installing a nightly on top of it. Thanks for reading my rant.