XBMC "Server" - centralized XBMC management for multiple XBMC devices/platforms?

Ok i know alot of people here only use XBMC on one machine or two. But my problem is im currently in the middle of building a 5 bedroom house and have 6 LCD screens (1 in each room + the lounge room) and they all are going to have small computers connected to them for the kids internet/games/etc. But what i was wondering that instead of setting each one up with a separate XBMC i was wondering if there is a way that i can setup my lounge room XBMC as the main one and then on each of the other computers can just extend it to them.

You already can connect them all together via UPnP. You will, however, still need to setup XBMC on each one and store games locally on each one since the games can only be played from the local drive.

the internet and games are fine stored locally they can just exit xbmc and load there games but the main thing is letting them access XBMC but without the chance of them changing/deleting/moving something.

I don't have any experience in this so I won't act like I do.But couldn't The Gemini server(for xbox) be implemented as a application somehow to run beside XBMC?Like I said I have no Idea if any of what it was or is can even be used in this situation.If I am way off please ignore me.

Hi there everyone.

I did a little poking around but couldn't really find anything that fit what I wanted to do.

I have a main HTPC installation with XBMC on it and it it running beautifully. What I want to do is install it on my bedroom PC and share the database/fanart across the two PCs. Is this at all possible ?

Thanks

There are several threads on this. ATM, the only *way* to do this would be to put the profile data on some network share and point all installs to this. However, you will likely run into the obvious latency and concurrency problems. If you want more detail on what's been discussed before just search the forums for things like "share database" and you should finds all sorts of info.

Maybe a case could be made for making a sort of API interface between the data store and the rest of XBMC, it would not change the way XBMC works right now but it would offer further development posibilities.
As soon as there is an API between the data store and the rest of the system one could take out the datastore and replace this by a system that is able to handle multiple users and multiple locations.

I have no idea how hard it might be to do something like that in the code (never looked at that part of it before) but I think it would be a worthy investment of time and effort that could open up a whole new realm of posibilities for displaying and using the data stored in the DB.

rcoops Wrote:Maybe a case could be made for making a sort of API interface between the data store and the rest of XBMC, it would not change the way XBMC works right now but it would offer further development posibilities.

As soon as there is an API between the data store and the rest of the system one could take out the datastore and replace this by a system that is able to handle multiple users and multiple locations.

Yes I believe that something like ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) database abstraction layer would be needed to allow multiple client connections to the same database at the same time, this has been discussed before, see:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=37449
and
http://forum.xbmc.org/tags.php?tag=synchronize

The problem is, as usual, getting a developer with the time, interest, and skill to code this and submit a patch.

PS! I am not a programmer/coder myself

As a first step, I am looking at providing an option to use a networked mysql database for videos (and later music). My idea to add an setting that allow you to chose either the current local database scheme, or specify a server address/name, userid, password for a mysql server. The databases would be created based on the user profile selected in xbmc. If the same user profiles are setup in each frontend, then the database would be shared. Mysql has no issue with multiple database connections. This is the way mythtv works and I have a fair amount of experience with the mythtv side.

I've just started looking at the code, but it doesn't look to bad since sqllite and mysql are pretty similar.

Why don't you just split database (library) to remote (read only) part and local (full access) part? And let the XBMC merges them all together on every power on.
Because XBMC clients may have their own HDDs and some media files on it. So local media will be scanned to local database, which will be stored on the local HDD or USB Flash Drive.
In the same way you can split profiles to the remote and local parts, which will be merged on every power on. The local part may contain, for example, hardware information (like screen resolution, audio output and so on).