HowTo: Centralize Your XBMC Library with MySQL


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If you are a newbie and have multiple XBMC HTPCs in your home and want to have a shared library stored in your unRAID server, this guide will help you get on your way. The only benefit of this is if you have multiple XBMC devices in your home. Having a shared library means that all your XBMC devices are synchronized. If you start watching a movie in your den, and stop it, you can resume watching in your bedroom from where you left off. Watched item status is also shared between all your devices. Your posters and fanart are all shared in one place. Lastly, updating your library on one device, will update all other devices. This method should work with Movies, TV shows and Music.

 

The beauty is that this will work if you have a mixture of XBMC devices running on Windows 7, XBMC Live, OS X, Ubuntu, and Apple TV 2. This guide will show you how to do it for each platform.

 

Edit: internetfriend reports this is not achievable under Windows XP, as symlinks or their equivalent cannot be created.

 

First some disclaimers:

 

1) I am a newbie, and this is for newbies. Pros please go easy on me. If there are better ways, please chime in. If you encounter problems, there is a good chance that I will not know the answers.

 

2) The information contained here was culled from many sources. I want to simplify it for others to implement.

 

3) I take ZERO credit for anything here. Special thanks go to funbubba, to the folks at Lifehacker.com (my favorite web site), and to the countless members on this forum and the XBMC forum.

 

It is assumed you have successfully configured your unRAID server to serve media to the various devices via Samba shares. It is also assumed you have unMenu installed. I am using the latest 4.7 release of unRAID and unMenu. I believe some of the steps outlined below will change with Release 5.

 

It is also assumed you know how to telnet and sftp into unRAID and your XBMC device (not required for Win7 XBMC).

 

I am using the Pro version of unRAID with a dedicated cache drive. I do not know how to do this without one.

 

IMPORTANT

As a newbie, I have set up my unRAID with very little security. I know the experts will balk at this. I have left all my shares open to everybody and do not have a password to get into unRAID. I am only storing my media which I freely share with everyone in my household. If you have setup more security, I assume you know more than I do and thus you are able to adapt this guide to include any security measures you have implemented.

 

Step 0 - Preparation

 

For this to work, you are going to have to delete your media sources within XBMC. Now this may be a very hard pill to swallow for some, as XBMC re-scraping can take hours. If you currently have a neatly organized library you have built over time, I recommend Lifehacker's Export and import method (link below). You can import them back at the end  of my Step 2. I did not do it this way…

 

I use a Metadata Managing program called Media Center Master. But I believe many other do the same, Ember, Media Companion, etc. They basically scan the folders with all your media and they download the metadata along with poster and fanart. They store these .nfo, .tbn, jpg, etc. files in the same folders where your movies are. So when I delete one of my media sources, XBMC looks for data here before attempting to scrape the info from the web. This scraping will be accurate as you have managed it all along the way. This process will take significantly less time than doing it from scratch.

 

Please bear in mind that we are going to scrape your library twice. Why, because in my case it took 20 minutes or so to do each scrape and I wanted to test along the way. I also did Steps 2 and 3 at different times as I was learning. You can scrape at the end of Step2, and the at the end of Step 3, or you could simply wait to scrape at the end - but things will be harder to troubleshoot.

 

edit: Step 1 - Swap File and unRAID Shutdown

 

In order to cleanly shutdown unRAID after installing MySQL, the normal Stop and Reboot on unRAID will not work as it will not stop the MySQL running proceeses. Go to unMenu's Package Manager and activate the Clean Powerdown script. Enable on reboot if available. This way when you need to shutdown, you go into unMenu's User Script and you click on the "Power Down" button.

 

This process requires you to install MySQl server on your unRAID server (described later on). Typically unRAID is stored on a USB thumb drive of limited size. Also unRAID servers do not have large amounts of RAM. The problem is that MySQL can potentially use a lot of memory. To compensate, we can create a swap file for the system to use as additional memory in case you exceed your RAM capacity. BUT creating a swap file on the thumb drive can shorten the lifespan of the thumb drive. Thumb drives have a limited amount of read/writes, that the swap file would use up.

 

So the best method to do this is to create the swap file in your cache drive. To create a swap file go into unMenu and click on Pkg Manager. Scroll down the list and click on the button for "unRAID Swapfile Configuration. Install the package and click on "Configuration variables".

 

Swap File Size (Megabytes): I entered 4096 for mine

 

Swap file Directory: IMPORTANT - chance this to "/mnt/cache". Using the default will install the swapfile to your flash drive, thus limiting the life expectancy of your thumbdrive.

 

Click on "Save New Values".

 

Step 2 - Installing and configuring MySQL

 

This is derived mostly from the Lifehacker guide at http://lifehacker.com/#!5634515/how-to-synchronize-your-xbmc-media-center-across-every-room-in-the-house but modified to implement in unRAID.

 

To install MySQL go into unMenu and click on Pkg Manager. Scroll down the list and click on the button for "MySQL Database Server". Download the package. Click on "Edit Configuration Variables".  

 

Enter the Hostname of your unRAID server - mine is the default "Tower" (without quotes)

 

Disk Label: is where you want MySQL to install its files - I chose "disk1"

 

MySQL Password: enter a password of your choice. This is not the same password that you use to log in to unRAID. Remember the password.

 

First Database: accept the default

 

Database User: accept "root" default

 

Database User Password: enter another password of your choice it is likely you will never have to enter this password.

 

Custom Parameters: leave blank.

 

Click on "Save Values" and then click on "Restart Using New values". You also want to enable to re-install on reboot.

 

Open up a telnet session into your unRAID server and at the command prompt enter:

mysql -u root -p

 

Type the MySQL Password you entered above.

 

Now every step here is the same as the Lifehacker guide. At the terminal enter:

 

CREATE USER 'xbmc' IDENTIFIED BY 'xbmc';

 

You should get a Query OK message

 

Enter both lines:

 

CREATE database xbmc_video;
CREATE database xbmc_music;

 

You should get Query OK messages

 

Enter:

 

CREATE database xbmc_music;

 

You should get a Query OK message

 

Enter:

SELECT host,user from mysql.user;

SHOW DATABASES;

 

You should get results like shown on this image:

 

500x_2010-09-10_014704.jpg

 

Type "exit" to quit out of the MySQL command line.

 

Please proceed to Step Two of the Lifehacker guide. I will specify below WHERE you need to place the advancedsettings.xml file for each XBMC platform.

 

http://lifehacker.com/#!5634515/how-to-synchronize-your-xbmc-media-center-across-every-room-in-the-house

 

At the end of Lifehacker's Step Two guide, you need to place the advancedsettings.xml file in specific locations depending on what platform is running XBMC. It is important you remember these locations as we will be doing further edits to the file in Step 3.

 

For XBMC running on Windows 7:

 

Copy and paste the text below into the Explorer address bar or the Run box.

 

%APPDATA%\XBMC\userdata

 

For XBMC running on Apple TV 2:

 

You need to sftp the advancedsettings.xml file into the following directory of your ATV2:

 

/private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences/XBMC/userdata/

 

For XBMC running on dedicated XBM Live computer:

 

Please note that if you already have an advancedsettings.xml file in this location, you need to ADD the Lifehacker contents to this file. Do not overwrite the old file with a new file.

You need to sftp the advancedsettings.xml file into the following directory

 

/home/<your-name>/.xbmc/userdata/

 

 

For XBMC running on Mac OS X:

 

~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/userdata

 

For XBMC running on Ubuntu

 

~/.xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails

 

 

Once you have copied the file, you need to either import your old library OR to re-add the sources to your XBMC. Once this is complete, test with files to see if your various XBMC devices are all properly syncing. This is described in Lifehacker guide.

 

So what do we have at the end of this process? You can basically "stop and resume" your movies or TV shows in different devices. BUT the rest of your library, metadata, posters and thumbnails are stored in each device independently. If you add a movie and update the library on one device, you will need to repeat this process on all other devices. Contrary to what the Lifehacker article says, this is the way XBMC operates. Metadata stored with your movies is NOT the metadata being displayed by XBMC. When initially scanning or updating your media, XBMC copies this data to each device and displays from this copy.

 

Let fix this…

 

Step 3 - Sharing Metadata and Thumbnails

 

This step puts it all together. Now, there are some that complain that, graphically, their libraries take time to display. The culprit is always because the posters and thumbnails are being read from the server. If you are connected via Wifi, this may be iffy. If you are connected via hardwired ethernet, you should not feel this… unless the drive holding your thumbnails needs to spin up.

 

This section is going to be a work in progress. I will add device platforms as I test them. So far I have Win7, Apple TV 2, and XBMC Live.

 

Depending on the device(s) you have, the procedure is different for each. But the principle is the same. XBMC stores all your posters, thumbnails and fanart in a sub folder called /Thumbnails. The location of this folder varies on each platform. What we are going to do to centralize, is to re-direct each XBMC to look for this Thumbnail folder into our unRAID centralized location. Most people refer this to as the symlink method. It varies per platform.

 

Please make sure XBMC is not running while doing this. It is OK if XBMC Live device is running.

 

First we need to create the Thumbnails folder in one of your unRAID shares. I have a share called Media, with sub-folders for Movies, TV, Music. Inside my Media folder I created a \Thumbnails folder. Be aware that unRAID is case sensitive on spelling. For testing purposes, copy some random file into this folder. When testing the symlinks, we will see this file.

 

At the end of this process, on ONE of your XBMC devices, you are going to delete any media sources you have for Movies, TV and Music you have and clean up your library.

 

Windows 7

 

Windows allows the creation of symlinks. Copy and paste the text below into the Explorer address bar or the Run box.

 

%APPDATA%\XBMC\userdata

 

In the windows that pops open, rename the folder "Thumbnails" to "Thumbnails-old".

Copy and paste the text below into the Explorer address bar or the Run box.

 

%APPDATA%\XBMC

 

(Edited 3/4/11) Open an elevated Command Prompt by going to Start Menu > All Programs > Accessories, right-click over Command Prompt, and select "Run as Administrator". On the terminal window that opens type the following substituting the correct path for YOUR Thumbnail share:

 

cd %appdata%\XBMC\userdata
mklink /D Thumbnails \\192.168.0.201\Media\Thumbnails

 

Open up the /userdata folder and you should see a Thumbnails shortcut style folder. If you double click it, it should take you to the unRAID shared Thumbnails folder.

 

Apple TV 2

 

First you need to update your ATV2 XBMC to the latest nightly build. Go to this http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=92261 and locate and COPY to your clipboard the link to the latest ATV2 DEB (at time of this writing it is the Feb 27, 2011)

 

SSH into your AppleTV. After entering the password enter the following commands:

 

cd /private/var/tmp

wget (paste the link to the latest ATV2 DEB file)

dpkg -i (paste the file name only of the downloaded link)

rm -rf (paste the file name only of the downloaded link)

Close SSH terminal window.

 

You will now need to edit the advancedsettings.xml file you created is Step 1 above. Edit this file to add the text below and then sftp the file to the same location described on Step 1. Change the path names to your actual share.

 

<pathsubstitution>
<substitute>
	<from>special://masterprofile/Thumbnails</from>
	<to>smb://192.168.0.201/Media/Thumbnails/</to>
</substitute>
</pathsubstitution>

 

So your entire file should read this.

 

<advancedsettings>
   <videodatabase>
       <type>mysql</type>
       <host>192.168.0.201</host>
       <port>3306</port>
       <user>xbmc</user>
       <pass>xbmc</pass>
       <name>xbmc_video</name>
   </videodatabase> 

   <musicdatabase>
       <type>mysql</type>
       <host>192.168.0.201</host>
       <port>3306</port>
       <user>xbmc</user>
       <pass>xbmc</pass>
       <name>xbmc_music</name>
   </musicdatabase>

<pathsubstitution>
<substitute>
	<from>special://masterprofile/Thumbnails</from>
	<to>smb://192.168.0.201/Media/Thumbnails/</to>
</substitute>
</pathsubstitution>


</advancedsettings>

 

XBMC Live

 

Similar to Windows, we need to create a symlink to the thumbnails folder. This requires that one mounts the smb Thumbnails share location at boot time.

 

To achieve this, ssh into your XBMC Live machine with your username (not root) and password.

 

I like navigating around the command line using Midninght Commander - same thing as in unRAID. To install midnight commander type:

 

sudo apt-get install mc

 

To mount the smb share, we need to install Samba. To install type:

 

sudo apt-get install smbfs

 

We need a folder for the mount point.

 

sudo su

 

Type your password

 

cd
sudo mkdir /media/thumbs

 

Now we need to edit the /etc/fstab file. For me the easiest way to do this is to use the editor in MC. So type:

 

mc

 

Arrow up and over to the /etc/fstab file. Highlight fstab and hit the F4 key. Arrow to the end of the copy and manually type the following substituting your path where appropriate.

 

//192.168.0.201/Media/Thumbnails  /media/thumbs  cifs  guest,uid=1000

 

To test without having to re-boot type:

sudo mount -a

 

In MC arrow up and over to /media/thumbs and you should be able to see whatever content (if any) is in the Thumbnails share.

 

If this is working, we create the symlink.

 

Quit MC and type "exit" to exit root. Type the following commands:

 

cd $HOME/.xbmc/userdata

mv Thumbnails Thumbnails.old

ln -s /media/thumbs Thumbnails

 

Mac OS X

 

- First we need to download speeding_ant's mount.sh script from http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=dd7b64d8b8872dbc98c9ffba23a44f39&topic=10274.0

 

- Follow the instructions from that page to mount the unRAID share hosting your thumbnails.  Let's pretend that it's \\192.168.0.201\Media\Thumbnails.  Once you've completed, you should see /Volumes/Media from Finder.

 

- From Finder, drill down to ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/userdata

 

- Rename Thumbnails to Thumbnails.old.  Set this window aside for now.

 

- Open Applications > Utilities > Terminal

 

- Create the symbolic link by using the following command

 

ln -s /Volumes/Media/Thumbnails ~/Library/Application\ Support/XBMC/userdata/Thumbnails

 

 

- Once completed, go back to the Finder window and double-click on the new Thumbnails folder to verify.

 

 

Ubuntu

Similar to XBMC Live.

 

Step 4 - Wrapping It Up

 

Now if you have done this to various devices, all you need to do is to go to one of them, make sure you have nothing in your Movies, TV SHows or Music Libraries. As mentioned on Step 0, you need to now either re-scrape from scratch by Adding sources to Movies, TV and Music, OR to Import your previously exported library. I have not done the latter, so your mileage may vary.

 

After adding your sources and re-scraping, you should now be able to go to your other XBMC machines and see the same library.

 

My work flow for adding movies to the library is to first copy the file to right share folder. Then I use a Media Center Master to get the metadata, fanart, etc. which gets stored alongside the movie. Then on only one of my XBMC machines I perform a library update. Then the movie appears on all other machines. Sickbeard does the scraping and storing automatically, and a simple single library update brings it up to speed.

 

I hope this helps. Please bear in mind I am not a super expert. I will help to the best of my abilities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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While I agree with the use of mysql, I wonder if you are introducing lag by using a remote thumbnail directory.  On most skins, the thumbnails are read very frequently.  This will result in a disk remaining spun up for much longer periods of time.

 

I use mysql for XBMC for a different reason and have preferred it.  I do not, however, install it on unraid.  For mysql to be effective, it should be taking approximately 50-100 MB to service the xbmc databases.  It should also be housed on a drive that is outside the array unless you want your disk spun up at all times.  A good cache will speed up queries and lower disk usage, but these do not fall into the description you gave (low-memory machines).

 

I just want people to be aware that (through no fault of your own) using such a setup will significantly increase the percentage of time your disks are spinning.  Thumbnail caching as proposed will also increase lag in retrieving thumbnails in a number of skins.  If you do not mind drives continuously spinning and value a consistent thumbnail directory over responsiveness, the directions will work for you.

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I think the mySQL to sync all your Watched videos is pretty cool however, in my situation like many I have all my videos stored on my unRAID machine with thumbnails, fanart, nfo's and when I turn one of my XBMC clients on it mearly scans the content and pulls down all the content. Its done once per client and doesn't have to do it again until I add a new flick or tv show. I guess I'm really confused on why that would need to be synced.

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While I agree with the use of mysql, I wonder if you are introducing lag by using a remote thumbnail directory.  On most skins, the thumbnails are read very frequently.  This will result in a disk remaining spun up for much longer periods of time.

 

 

Good point, but how often is one accessing the thumbnails/skins on a continuous basis..? According to funbubba's post http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=9628.msg99702#msg99702, the MySQL drives do spin down.

 

I like the idea of mounting an extra USB thumbdrive to store MYSQL but I wonder what the speed would be like. Would the Thumbnails still be stored in a share?

 

Thanks.

 

 

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Just one note to the above procedure.

 

It is not for 'ALL' instances of XBMC.  Meaning, 'This will not work for XBMC on XBOX!'

 

And before all the HooHa, yes, people still use XBMC on their Xbox's.  I personally have five unit's around my house, plus friends and some neightbours I've talked into this setup.

 

Just worth mentioning.

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I think the mySQL to sync all your Watched videos is pretty cool however, in my situation like many I have all my videos stored on my unRAID machine with thumbnails, fanart, nfo's and when I turn one of my XBMC clients on it mearly scans the content and pulls down all the content. Its done once per client and doesn't have to do it again until I add a new flick or tv show. I guess I'm really confused on why that would need to be synced.

 

In my case each Library scan update takes a good 8 minutes. With my method, you only scan once on one client and all the other clients are updated.

 

Nothing worse than telling my 6 y.o.son we have the new Disney movie, but he has to wait while I scan the Living Room client... What if I am not even home... he is not going to want to wait for me, or for  a scan to finish.

 

As part of my workflow, on my regular desktop machine, I add a new movie, get the metadata, and run an XBMC update on my desktop. Then all my clients have their library updated. Makes it very wife and little kid friendly.

 

 

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Just one note to the above procedure.

 

It is not for 'ALL' instances of XBMC.  Meaning, 'This will not work for XBMC on XBOX!'

 

And before all the HooHa, yes, people still use XBMC on their Xbox's.  I personally have five unit's around my house, plus friends and some neightbours I've talked into this setup.

 

Just worth mentioning.

 

Phonenix, out of curiosity, does XBMC on an Xbox play every type of .mkv file?

 

A while back I tried it with my Win 7 Media Center as an extender, but none of my movies played because the Xbox did not support the encoding. I was faced with having to re-encode my entire library, thus I abandoned the idea of Xbox as a media center. I never considered XBMC for it. It would be great if it did.

 

Thanks.

 

 

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Good point, but how often is one accessing the thumbnails/skins on a continuous basis..? According to funbubba's post http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=9628.msg99702#msg99702, the MySQL drives do spin down.

 

I like the idea of mounting an extra USB thumbdrive to store MYSQL but I wonder what the speed would be like. Would the Thumbnails still be stored in a share?

 

Thanks.

 

 

 

The MySQL drive does spin down, but is only effective while spun down if there is enough memory for it.  I avoid swap and just buy more memory.

 

Just FYI, I use mysql but don't host it on unraid.

 

Thumbnail usage is very skin-dependent.  If you have a wall view and a lot of movies, the usage on the thumbnail cache can be exactly the wrong kind of access.

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Hell yes, this was the last step I needed to take on my unraid server.

 

This back and forth on discs being spun up, if I install all the MSQL data to the cache drive will that be ok as long as I periodically back up the database? (Is backing it up easily possible? I've never used MSQL before)

 

If my Cache drive spins all the time I'm ok with that, couchpotato kind of does that anyway so its not a big deal to me.

 

thanks!

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Thumbnail usage is very skin-dependent.  If you have a wall view and a lot of movies, the usage on the thumbnail cache can be exactly the wrong kind of access.

 

I use the Xperience skin, on a wall configuration for my movies. On my $99 Apple TV 2, all the thumbnails load in about 1.5 sec. By the time my eye gets to see what the first movie is, all others are loaded. I am hardwired... on my desktop pc, the wall loads instantly.

 

Alaska Revisited skin with a wall is just as fast...

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This back and forth on discs being spun up, if I install all the MSQL data to the cache drive will that be ok as long as I periodically back up the database? (Is backing it up easily possible? I've never used MSQL before)

 

If my Cache drive spins all the time I'm ok with that, couchpotato kind of does that anyway so its not a big deal to me.

 

thanks!

 

I believe you can export your XBMC library. On one of your XBMC clients you can go to Settings and export the library, this way if you loose your library, you have a backup of it.

 

For me it is more about convenience than security. I can always re-scrape my libraries as I have the metadata stored with the movie anyway. The watched-unwatched feature is not a killer feature for me.

 

I am not so worried about drives spinning (am I being naive?). It is not like I am looking at movies all day long. And unRAID is the machine with most storage, and is on 24-7, and it spins up when I want to watch a movie.

 

 

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Does anyone know how to migrate the library data to mysql keeping the 'watched' status flag along the way?

 

Do not know the answer, but perhaps prior to doing the MySQL, exporting your library in one of the machines that has your flags. Then after the whole process, you Import the library instead of adding sources. But this is just a guess.

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Thanks for the tutorial!

 

I have followed all the steps, however using the smlink it does not authenticate on the unraid server. Is there a way around this?

 

I tried user:passwrod@ but thats as far as my knowlege goes :P

 

Thanks

 

On what platform are you trying to do this? And at what step are you stuck?  You may need to mount the unRAID drive before anything.

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Hi there. Sorry for not giving enough info.

 

In windows when creating the link to the Thumbnails file from the windows pc to the Unraid share, it creates it but does not work afterwards. Says something about authentication. i assume its loggin in using the share user name and password.

 

EDIT: Scrap that, its working now...just waiting to see it XBMC uses the new network folder for the images...

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Hey hernandito, nice job on the guide!

 

Hopefully, I can help fill in the TBD gaps for the other operating systems this weekend.

 

Also, a quick thought on mklink.  If UAC is enabled, I'm pretty sure mklink requires an elevated command prompt to work (at least right now it does, at work).  In which case, the procedure would be:

 

1. Click Start

2. Type cmd in the Search programs and files field.

3. Press Ctrl-Shift-Enter when it appears in the search results.  Click Yes to open cmd as an administrator.

4. Then in the command prompt type:

 

cd %appdata%\XBMC\userdata
mklink /D Thumbnails \\192.168.0.201\Media\Thumbnails

 

Anyhoo, please confirm that prior to editing, if you choose to do so.

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Also, a quick thought on mklink.  If UAC is enabled, I'm pretty sure mklink requires an elevated command prompt to work (at least right now it does, at work).  In which case, the procedure would be:

 

1. Click Start

2. Type cmd in the Search programs and files field.

3. Press Ctrl-Shift-Enter when it appears in the search results.  Click Yes to open cmd as an administrator.

4. Then in the command prompt type:

 

cd %appdata%\XBMC\userdata
mklink /D Thumbnails \\192.168.0.201\Media\Thumbnails

 

Anyhoo, please confirm that prior to editing, if you choose to do so.

 

Hey Bubba,

 

Thanks... Good point on the UAC. I have it disabled. I will edit the guide to add your method.

 

I did test the OSX in my Hackintosh, and got it to work. But first I manually opened the unRAID Thumbnails folder in Finder. If I do not do that, the images do not show up in XBMC. I have to auto-mount the share at boot time. I found the method how to do that, but I was too tired to try it.

 

Thanks again for everything.

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hey all you peoples who have done this, I set this up last night (thanks again for the tutorial, the only issue I had was setting up a symlink in windows XP since its not a native command) - but I previously had SETS set up for my movies, like THE GODFATHER etc. They don't show up in my library as a set anymore. Anyone else using sets and knows for a fact it works and my system is just not pulling the nfos correctly or something?

 

thanks!

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hey all you peoples who have done this, I set this up last night (thanks again for the tutorial, the only issue I had was setting up a symlink in windows XP since its not a native command) - but I previously had SETS set up for my movies, like THE GODFATHER etc. They don't show up in my library as a set anymore. Anyone else using sets and knows for a fact it works and my system is just not pulling the nfos correctly or something?

 

thanks!

 

I do not really use sets but does this help:

 

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Movie_Sets

 

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hey all you peoples who have done this, I set this up last night (thanks again for the tutorial, the only issue I had was setting up a symlink in windows XP since its not a native command) - but I previously had SETS set up for my movies, like THE GODFATHER etc. They don't show up in my library as a set anymore. Anyone else using sets and knows for a fact it works and my system is just not pulling the nfos correctly or something?

 

thanks!

 

You may need to manually edit the NFOs with your movies and add the Thumbnails inside XBMC..

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I did test the OSX in my Hackintosh, and got it to work. But first I manually opened the unRAID Thumbnails folder in Finder. If I do not do that, the images do not show up in XBMC. I have to auto-mount the share at boot time. I found the method how to do that, but I was too tired to try it.

 

Without getting too far ahead (but you seem to link to tinker :).  For OS X, I used speeding_ant's script to mount the SMB share to /Volumes:

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=10274.0

 

Set it to run at login, then I created a symlink to Thumbnails (I have no way to verify this command at this moment BTW)

ln -s /Volumes/<sharename> ~/Library/Application\ Support/xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails

 

They don't show up in my library as a set anymore. Anyone else using sets and knows for a fact it works and my system is just not pulling the nfos correctly or something?

 

I'm not familiar with SETS, but if you cleared your library prior to implementing the MySQL stuff, then you may have to recreate the sets.  I don't know, sorry :(

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By the way, I created a couple of screencasts demonstrating how fast/slow (you be the judge) the thumbnails appear.  For those who are undecided about undertaking this intimidating project.

 

One when wired:

 

The other when wireless:

 

Please please please don't judge my whacked taste in Movies/TV/Music.  I'm ashamed enough as it is.

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