[hernandito]

After rolling out 3 HTPCs in my home, one using an ATV2, oe an XBMC Live and one Win 7, with my media stored on a dedicated unRAID server; it is very apparent that storing one's metadata and thumbnails in a single centralized location would make life much easier.

It is my understanding that each XBMC device holds the metadata locally. There are a few tutorials how to centralize the database and thumbnails, mainly this:

For the Database

and

For the Thumbnails - See post 108 on page 11.

If one follows these setups, I think the following would be a killer app.

A new Metadata Scraper like Ember or Media Center Master, or Media Companion, where one could input:

a) Where the Movies are Stored
b) Where MySQL database is located (with password and such)
c) Where the Substitute Thumbnails folder is. (from post 108 on page 11 above)

Then; one could scrape one's movies; it would detect new movies and TV shows and scrape accordingly, it would also check for metadata stored in Movie and TV folders and add that to MySQL - Like when using Sickbeard, or Couch Potato.

Like the old IBM commercials would end, "Now that would be cool..."

I don't know the first thing about programming, so this is just a dream.

What do you guys think?

Thanks,


H.

[haffi]

I really like the sound of something like this, I have 2 linux boxes using nfs mounts and running xbmc from remote shares and therefore thumbnails are ok, however my oter 3 mashines (atv2, ipad, win7) cannot access it this way , I see this as a good solve

now what would be the best way to impliment it? some say useing blob fields in db for thumbnails, others say use some kind of service that will juste offer thumbnails and central db for the xbmc.

reason for me of useing thumbails on remote share are that my linux mashines are booted from usb and therefor havelimited io speed reading and writing thumbs and files, also limited size, alos the ipad and atv2 are client that you dont want to store 1000... of thumbnails localy and slow all the proccess plus atv2 only has 8gb storage local if I remember right

[stutch]

I think you have the right idea here. If we could figure out a way to build a service that could scrape your media libraries and then update the central MySQL server and thumbnail directories directly, you could then disable scans on XBMC start-up and notification triggered scans on your end point devices. Being an ATV2 user, this would be ideal, as intermittent scans are quite intrusive to the overall experience.