Thumbs on a remote windows machine?

[kingspod]

hi guys,

i have three xboxes in the house, and i have a media server which all xboxes can view. i have sat and sorted out thumbs for all the video on my server using imdb feature.

what i would like to know is that i know there is a thumbs folder on the xbox where they are stored, and if i copy this folder to each of the xboxes then the thumbs are retained. is it possible to store this thumbs file on the server?

i have tried this out by changing the thumbs entry in the xml file to:

<thumbnails>smb://user:pass@192.168.0.x/thumbs</thumbnails>

and that points to the correct place and it writable too. however, the folders no longer have thumbnails.... is this possible? i suspect not.

thanks in advance for any help.

craig

[jmarshall]

no, you can't do this. reason is, we need to load the thumbs very quickly, as the xbox has limited memory, so we only load in the thumbs that you view at any time.

the network would add far too much lag to this.

[kingspod]

thanks for the reply, thats a shame though. on a nice fast network would it too much slower? is it just a hassle to get the samba working on that because for us people with more than one xbox it would be ideal, even with a trade off of making the folders appear slower. yes i know you guys are busy and everybody loves what you guys do, including me, so a "no we wont even try" it would be a good enough response :)

cheers
craig

[jmarshall]

yes, it's a hassle, and yes, it would be too slow. we would have to cache everything locally anyway.

what could be achieved is that we could make it so that thumbs generated by xbmc were optionally sent to a remote folder as well as being sent to a local folder. this would obviously slow down thumbnail generation, but that wouldn't be too much of a problem. the idea would be to have 2 thumb folders:

1. remotethumbs
2. localthumbcache

xbmc would first look in the localthumbcache, then revert to the remote thumbcache, then revert to <filename>.tbn etc. the initial lookup/caching would take approximately twice as long (as it'd require seeking into the thumbs dir) but once cached, it'd be quite fast.

the problem is how to name these thumbnails on the remote server. xbmc uses a crc to name it's localcached thumbs.

feel free to suggest options.

(note, just cause it can be done, doesn't mean it will be - we're all very, very busy people)

cheers,
jonathan