[Vardnas]

Hi, thanks for the reply.

I thought XBMC worked well with UPnP as I saw a whole page on it on wiki XBMC and it said that mediatomb was supported as a mediaserver (UPnP Sharing).

Do you know a way I could stream my videos and have a library ?

[spiff]

smb / windows shares?

the problem is that upnp ONLY shares the media files, and those media files may have (in theory) volatile urls and often does not reflect the file name at all. this means that storing those urls in a database is a risky sport and it means we cannot "see" additional stuff like thumbs, nfo files etc.

yes, we support streaming from media tomb, but not scraping. from the looks of it, media tomb only provides rich info for music files.

[>>X<<]

Is there some reason your not using smb and trying to use UPnP instead smb is a much better option

[Vardnas]

Ok, I knew the UPnP protocole was not a fixed adress but I though mediatomb could bypass the issue.
No real reason why I'm not using samba besides form the fact that mediatomb works perfectly with my PS3.
I might try to use Samba but I think it doesn't work with the ps3 unless I put linux on it but won't be able to use the playstation network. At first, I didn't know if mediatomb and samba would be in conflict or not so I focused on UPnP that I knew was supported by both.

Windows shares doesn't work as the server is debian based and I'd rather stream the videos than copying them.

[spiff]

uhm, use samba on the debian server. works a treat.

[Vardnas]

How does samba work ? Stream or ftp based ?

[prae5]

Samba / cifs provides the equivalent of windows file/print sharing in linux. Basically windows shares under linux.

[spiff]

and to explicitly answer your question; it's streaming.

[mfaine]

It would be great if you could scrape upnp sources. I just discovered after purchasing a new NAS that I'm going to have to mount a drive to use the library features of xbmc. I was hoping to switch to upnp sources on all of my computers/devices.

[kecsap]

Hi,

I tried to google, but I did not find the answer.

My current situtation:
- I have a desktop computer TVersity UPnP server with WinXP acting as a UPnP share via home network.
- I have a laptop running XBMC under WinXP.
- The watched status is used when I watch something from e.g. DVD on the laptop locally, but the content of the TVersity UPnP shares do not use this feature of the XBMC.

What I want to achieve:
Able to use watched/unwatched state of movies from a remote share.

What I have found so far:
The watched/unwatched feature of the XBMC does not work because the watched content is from a UPnP share. The XBMC can work as a server, but it is also based on UPnP. It sounds for me that it does not matter if the server is XBMC or TVersity, I can't use the watched/unwatched status caused by the UPnP. But: the XBMC client can use shared SQL database with an other XBMC (server?).

Question:
What the heck should I do? XBMC in server mode (UPnP??) with shared SQL database?

[jmarshall]

UPnP does not have stable URLs, thus the reason you can't use 'em at present for tracking watched status - with UPnP the watched status should be implemented on the server side (with client code adapted so that this can occur).

Use a file sharing protocol such as SMB if you wish to do this.

[rapalax]

I find it hard to believe that UPNP sources cannot be better supported by XBMC.

My current setup includes an XBMC upnp server and and XBMC HTPC that uses the former for content. The XBMC HTPC works pretty well in File Mode in that it shows the correct thumbnails and titles. In library mode however, it doesn't get the names of the movies right, and it doesn't download any fanart.

The argument that the URL is volatile doesn't really hold because you can get the movie names just fine in file mode, and this could be fed to the scraper.
As for watched/resume status, this can always be saved locally, just like is done on my xbox360.

I prefer not to use samba for this and I dont think its appropriate as I am also serving the content to other upnp clients in my home like my xbox360. I also don't want to worry about the Authentication issues that samba brings into the picture either.

[jmarshall]

The argument that the URL is volatile doesn't really hold

The whole point of library mode is you're viewing metadata. You click on the metadata item and it then goes and plays the file, as it knows what the URL is.

If the URL isn't the same, you can't play the file anymore.

Thus, the only way to do it is to store the metadata detached from the file URL and instead browse by the file URL system, and hope that the metadata link (eg title+year, imdb number, tmdb number or whatever) is enough to accurately associate data. You can't just "show me all my movies" anymore, instead you must go via the file heirarchy.

[rapalax]

Thus, the only way to do it is to store the metadata detached from the file URL and instead browse by the file URL system, and hope that the metadata link (eg title+year, imdb number, tmdb number or whatever) is enough to accurately associate data.

Why is a 2way mapping not feasible ? I realize that you'll be browsing through your metadata objects not really knowing if the stored url is still valid, but until you actually update your library content (and validate metadata=>urls), the same can be said about all your local files as well no?

[jmarshall]

Because UPnP is known to not be stable. Local filesystems are all known to be stable. It really is that simple.

It's got nothing to do with updating library content - that is no problem as you're reading the filesystem and updating info in the library. The tricky bit is the other way around: Given the metadata and an unstable URL, what is current URL? To answer this you need a unique identifier (as I suggest - tmdb id may work for movies) that you can use to search the filesystem and hopefully get find current URL.

Given that UPnP is primarily designed to serve media (i.e. metadata) rather than files, it seems obvious that storing the information locally (other than purely for caching purposes) is not a good idea. There's nothing wrong with supplementing this with additional information stored locally, but it all has to be done from the browsing the served data side of things (i.e. browse UPnP listing -> grab unique identifiers -> supplement additional data -> display listing).

XBMC contains a UPnP server + client that can be used exactly in this manner. We serve up the library metadata for an attractive display. If improvements can be made in this area, we need to know about 'em.

Cheers,
Jonathan