[adskee]

I've just been reading through this thread and have finally discovered what I would have liked to have known last night before spending three hours on it - uPNP cannot support library mode.

Problem is, when I go to add my source under SAMBA shares, it can see my drive and it can see a "configuration" folder in it, but for some reason I just can't figure out, the "public" folder just isn't visible so I can't use SMB. I'm using a WD Sharespace NAS and the public folder is visible and shared with full access. It's available to view on my PC and MAC and definitely set up for CIFS (which I understand is SMB).

I've read some posts about logging out of XBMC and trying:

sudo apt-get install smbfs smbclient

or changing the skin back to Confluence from Media Stream Redux to fix the problem I'm not too hot with Linux commands so wondered if there is something obvious I'm missing.

This is my second implementation (for my old man) and the first one (mine) went very smoothly (with a QNAP NAS). Can't figure out if it's the NAS or the XBMC.

[Finnboat]

ye si would like to work this out to, cant de difficult

[oracle_sod]

Yea i would have liked to know this before i wasted so much time on setting up my network...

I have a windows box running TVersity that is transcoding all my movies... that box also runs XBMC and is my HTPC which is great !

however when i travel i use OpenVPN with my router and connect into my network...

i want to use XBMC on my traveling machine to do the same as my HTPC however with added transcoding, as XBMC does not support transcoding natively i created the TVersity server to feed remote connections my movie list to xbmc.... now i just want to see descriptions and images of what to watch and build a library on the remote machine... but cant

has anyone found a way to do this using other protocols ?

[sunsear]

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.

Your statements seem true enough, unfortunately I don't know that much about it. The problem seems to be that most UPnP media servers don't really have metadata worth anything. If they did, we wouldn't really want/need the XBMC library.

Anyway, as a developer myself (Java though), my experience is that there are always workarounds possible for any problem. Would you be available for a quick chat?

Thanks so far I am at least more enlightened on UPnP :-),

Martin

[ganton]

And thus, if you have a UPnP sever you cannot add the files to the library.

Sometimes there is not other choice, for instance if you have a 23GB HD movie and you need to play it on a 1,6GHz fanless PC on the living room you better have a server on another place for transcoding.

So, right now I have two choices:

a) low res movies within XBMC library
b) high res movies without XBMC library

Neither of these are satisfactory to me and I do not really want to scramble throght XBMC database trying to add the files to the library (which BTW may be very tricky).

I just hope this is something you will include in your roadmap (i don't think you belive it's a bug..)

Rgrds

[meimeiriver]

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.

Yes, I know I'm quoting a scaringly old post; but this stuff still seems surprisingly relevant to date.

I got at least my Music library scraping over UPnP today (XBMC 13.2). Not sure whether it was already supported in the meantime, but TwonyMedia (the UPnP media server I'm using) supports a hard-coded 'Folder' format (instead of the usual Artists, Album, etc). Before it wouldn't scrape over UPnP, but now it does.

[wpbpete]

Can the "i" info screen be added to the context menu in upnp library?