UserData profiles (databases and thumbnails cache) on a SMB/Samba network share?

I have two Xboxs running XBMC pulling all files off a PC i.e no local content.

Is there anyway I can put the UserData file on the PC so that I don't have to keep updating both Xbox libraries? Both Xboxs are connected to TVs with the same specs, so GUisettings aren't a problem.

It'd be great if I can do this, as then my music and movie databases, especially top 100s, viewed movies etc will be synchronised

not currently no

ok, thanks

Greetings to EVERYONE

As this is my first post on this forum I would like to share some background. A few months ago I came across XBMC on the web and decided to try it out. A friend at work gave me an XBOX and the first thing I did was chip it and install XBMC. Well, I loved it so much that I got another two XBOXes and did the same thing so I could scatter them around the house. I set up a NAS and all of them can access media files from it. I’ve figure out how to do most things that I wanted to do apart from this:

On my main XBOX I sometimes spend some time organising the media and manually edit some stuff that’s not available IMDB or CDDB. Everything looks great on the main box and I can easily work out that copying the databases and thumbnails from the main box to the others will make them equally nice. But, I don’t want to have to do that every time I make some manual changes or download some IMDB or CDDB info.

What I want to do is share the databases and thumbnails from a SMB share on the NAS. And it would be really good that multiple boxes could use the databases at the same time. Is this possible with configuration like remapping directories? Would I be going in the right direction by remapping paths with ‘subst’? Will this work on an SMB share? Can the databases be shared?

LASTLY I would to thank the creators, contributors and maintainers for this excellent bit of software.
Two thumbs up to you

you cant...

first, the thumbnails are cache locally for speed. a remote cache would negate this and every access to a folder would be just as slow as when you first enter a folder for the first time.

and the databases must be local. the sqlite engine does not have any visibility into the shared locations.

this leaves you with two choices:
1) change the code however you like to remove these restrictions
2) write some python scripts to sync up your userdata folder between xboxes

kraqh3d Wrote:you cant...

first, the thumbnails are cache locally for speed. a remote cache would negate this and every access to a folder would be just as slow as when you first enter a folder for the first time.

and the databases must be local. the sqlite engine does not have any visibility into the shared locations.

this leaves you with two choices:
1) change the code however you like to remove these restrictions
2) write some python scripts to sync up your userdata folder between xboxes

Thanks for the prompt response and for the suggestions.

My problem is that I'm not much of a programmer (or at all).

What I do now is marry all my media files with a thumbnail image with tbn extensions on the shares. This has as much success as it can without much change to the application. It is not perfect but its okay... It does beat some of the low quality images that get downloaded from IMDB anyway...

This whole thought process started when I relised the shear number of modified xboxes I have running. I currently have an xbox running XBMC on each and every TV in my house, all wired to a central server which houses all of my house's media. It is quite a task to keep them all updated, and my friends/roommates/occational parent find it annoying that their settings are not uniform across all xboxes. I think it would be nifty if xbmc could be hacked together to do this:

have a central network server (aka 'squirrel') store each users 'userdata' settings. users would all share the same network shares, except a couple users who have extras (aka their own computers).
Big pluses would include being able to pause a video and resume it later on a different xbox. This could be achieved by:

* The prexisting setting to save locations in videos(video would be stopped then reopened. Works on same xbox now)
* A modified version of the XBMC Python script "ResumeX"(I guess stopped, dont really know)
* The not-likely option that XBMC could somehow premit a user to log-off and log back in mid-video playback. (best suggestion, probably not possible)

Remember, network share locations are all static, xboxs were all created by cloning, so all files exist in the same places.

Does anyone know if any of this is possible?
Any tips on where to start looking?
Any other wishes people have for their multi-box installations?

Would it be possible to even launch XBMC from a network share

This would mean updating only the files in the network share to update XBMC across all boxes!

I think the ability to have user settings, or even global default settings (like bookmarks) on a common share has real merit. I am sure there are many people who run multiple xboxes.

This might be a good way to achieve the "follow me" concept found on this post. http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=24415

no network share launching.

no network configuration files.

use scripts to syncronize.

there are technical reasons for this.