Integrating libraries from multiple computers

**aquariuso** · January 10th, 2010, 05:11 PM

I've got a number of machines in my house that (will be) running Boxee. I'd like each machine to be able to browse and view videos/music/etc on all the others. Now, obviously I can do that with UPnP and so on, but that means that I have to care which machine a particular video is on, and that's quite annoying. What I'd really like is for each machine to just show all available media files, including those available on other servers, as part of the normal Films/TV/whatever views, rather than having to browse to the specific server that a file is on. For extra credit, I shouldn't have to do anything at all to set this up. That'd be a lovely experience for people: you've already got a Boxee machine (dare I say a Boxee Box?) with all your videos on it; you plug in a new one in your bedroom, do nothing, and all your videos are available on it. Zero configuration, zero effort. Your media, everywhere.

I've looked a little into this and I can't find a way of doing it. Would it require serious under-the-covers replumbing of Boxee/XBMC to do this? Me doing that replumbing isn't totally out of the question if someone could give me a few pointers on where I might start looking...

**iblastoff** · January 10th, 2010, 05:37 PM

huh? why not just add them to your library over your local network. not sure where 'have to care which particular machine the video is on' comes into play at all. they are all aggregated into the main tv shows/videos listings.

also, instead of having your videos all over the place, why not store them on one central sharing one? that way at least not every single one of your computers has to be on in order to access your videos.

**aquariuso** · January 10th, 2010, 05:50 PM

Originally Posted by iblastoff

huh? why not just add them to your library over your local network. not sure where 'have to care which particular machine the video is on' comes into play at all. they are all aggregated into the main tv shows/videos listings.

Perhaps I'm missing something fundamental here. When you say "add them to your library over your local network"...how? Imagine I have "machine1", which has a load of videos on it, which boxee on machine1 will play fine as local files. If I now set up machine2, how do I tell it about the files on machine1?

also, instead of having your videos all over the place, why not store them on one central sharing one? that way at least not every single one of your computers has to be on in order to access your videos.

Two reasons: disc space (I don't have enough space in any one computer to have all my stuff on, but I do across the machines that I've got), and unreliability of my home network -- sometimes the "main" machine drops off the network, and I don't know why. I'm working on fixing it, but in the interim, I don't want the other boxees to be basically useless because they have no media, so some of the media is on those other boxees.

**darcilicious** · January 10th, 2010, 06:33 PM

Until we get our full-fledged HP Media Center I'm in the same boat as you: 100s of GBs of media scattered across oh, three or four systems.

I set up network/mapped drives (I'm primarily on Windows) and then Boxee will see them as local sources. Previous beta releases were much more stable in using network sources (not explicitly needing to set up a network/mapped drive) but that hasn't worked at all for me with this release.

settings / media / local sources OR network sources

is where you want to go in Boxee to set this all up though I know it doesn't address your idea of Boxee being more auto-aware of new media sources going live on the LAN. (SageTV does this to some extent on the machine its installed on -- if it detects a new "local" drive, mapped drives count, then it will display a popup and ask you if you want it to use it as a source of media, a recording destination or both)

**aquariuso** · January 10th, 2010, 06:46 PM

Originally Posted by darcilicious

Until we get our full-fledged HP Media Center I'm in the same boat as you: 100s of GBs of media scattered across oh, three or four systems.

I set up network/mapped drives (I'm primarily on Windows) and then Boxee will see them as local sources. Previous beta releases were much more stable in using network sources (not explicitly needing to set up a network/mapped drive) but that hasn't worked at all for me with this release.

settings / media / local sources OR network sources

is where you want to go in Boxee to set this all up though I know it doesn't address your idea of Boxee being more auto-aware of new media sources going live on the LAN.

sigh. Mapped drives? Really? Part of the reason I haven't done that is that some of the machines get suspended and resumed from suspend, as well as my network being a bit flaky; software, in general, does not deal all that well with this. In addition to how if I mount my videos folder on all the machines, each machine will then trundle off to imdb to look up the videos, and any unresolved videos will need to be manually resolved on all machines separately. This is why I want autodiscovery

Thanks for the pointers, though!

**hutmacher** · January 10th, 2010, 07:08 PM

i was thinking about the same thing (running boxee on multiple computers), mainly so i could use my desktop as a 'test' machine for setting up xml & whatnot...

if i was going to do that, i'd probably get a router like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833320023

it's got USB on it, which means you can basically ask it to be a NAS.

and one of these w/ a couple 1 TB drives (if you've got that much stuff)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-170-_-Product

i'd even consider upgrading the router config to a Tomato type thing, like here:
http://lifehacker.com/344765/turn-yo...er-with-tomato

That way you can pull it up from anywhere (no sleep etc).

**aquariuso** · January 10th, 2010, 07:17 PM

Originally Posted by hutmacher

it's got USB on it, which means you can basically ask it to be a NAS.

Oh yeah, I know that I could do this easily if I set up One Place On The Network Where All The Data Is. I'd just like to avoid that. And think of how nice an experience it would be to plug in a second Boxee machine and have all your existing media just appear as browseable on it without you having to do anything (let alone set up a mapped drive, which is horrible).

**hutmacher** · January 10th, 2010, 07:25 PM

Originally Posted by aquariuso

Oh yeah, I know that I could do this easily if I set up One Place On The Network Where All The Data Is. I'd just like to avoid that. And think of how nice an experience it would be to plug in a second Boxee machine and have all your existing media just appear as browseable on it without you having to do anything (let alone set up a mapped drive, which is horrible).

actually, if you're accessing it from one machine remotely, i would think you could be able to access all the drives the same way via the network path (instead of the mapping drives path)...

so if you shared a folder 'Movies$' on a machine called 'DesktopMedia', you could add it as a network drive from boxee by calling it '//desktopmedia/movies$' regardless of what machine it's on (even if you're calling if from the 'DesktopMedia' machine, it'll still recognize '//desktopmedia/movies$')

on my machine it'll 'wake up' the drive even if the machine is asleep

then you basically set up all your boxee paths to point to the network locs & be good with it.

now, sharing the same boxee databases & folders is a whole different matter & dont know if that's possible, but you could take your feed xmls/shortcut files/ etc & set up a bat file to copy them to your other machines hourly or something, since they're the same thing....