I have always run X-Box media centre from xbmc.org which is an amazing piece of open source software. The power, flexibility and scalability of it has blown me away. Currently the release is Frodo 12.3. Coincidently for a long time it no longer runs on the x-box unless some dirty tricks are applied, and for a long time I never even had one, but it runs beautifully on a Linux, several flavours of Windows computers and my Raspberry Pi.

The files in your library are automatically scanned by XBMC and it uses various scrappers to determine what the TV programme or film or music that the name relates to. But the rules are all straight forward and easy to follow. You can always create a .nfo file to describe the program if the file can not be found.

My main computer and the kids computers all want to watch the same films from a NAS drive (network attached storage – i.e. a disc available on your home network), and the best way to do that was to put it on a MySQL server.

That was easy enough, create a file called advancedsettings.xml and populate it with the basic data, obviously changing the host, usernames and database names to the appropriate settings for my configuration. The advanced settings file was on a windows box was under the user profile (.xbmc) either or in the home directory for a Linux box under ~.xbmc

<advancedsettings>
    <videodatabase>
        <type>mysql</type>
        <host>192.168.1.3</host>
        <port>3306</port>
        <user>xbmc</user>
        <pass>xbmc</pass>
        <name>video</name>
    </videodatabase> 

    <musicdatabase>
        <type>mysql</type>
        <host>192.168.1.3</host>
        <port>3306</port>
        <user>xbmc</user>
        <pass>xbmc</pass>
        <name>music</name>
    </musicdatabase>

     <videolibrary>
          <importwatchedstate>true</importwatchedstate>
     </videolibrary>
</advancedsettings>

Once it had loaded up with its new setting the concepts worked fine but the performance was always awful. It took 40 seconds to move between each menu and for a long time I thought this was just a problem with the size of my media library. I turned on the debugging (under advanced settings in xmbc and it appeared that the

Optimisations

MySQL

This gave massive performance advantages. As each request was actually timing out due to the reverse DNS lookup. The debug output did not give this impression, in fact it suggested the mysql server was very fast. Each time that a request was being made by XBMC to the SQL server, it looked up the name of who had made the request (Reverse DNS lookup) which it couldn’t resolve.

I solved this by ensuring all my devices running xbmc had the same ip address (using an option in my router under DHCP) and then set up a host table on the MySQL server to tell it what all the devices were called. (edit /etc/hosts and add each machines name and I/P address).

Raspberry Pi.

Use a fast usb stick or disc in addition to the SD card. Both are faster than the SD card itself.

XBMC

Under Setting -> system settings – Video Output

Put the resolution to disable 720 x 480. This only applies to the user interface and not anything you watch. By reducing this value, you are freeing up available memory.

Under Setting -> system settings – Video – File

Disable generate thumbnails – This scans each file as you preview it to find a thumb nail from the file. It massively slows down navigation.

Under Settings -> Skin settings -> Home Window Options

[Optional] Disable “recently watched”- Makes a fair performance difference on the Raspberry Pi – but I want this information so don’t disable it.

[Optional] Disable “Show Recently Added videos” – Makes a fair performance difference on the Raspberry Pi – but I want this information so don’t disable it.

Under Settings -> Skin settings -> Background Options

[Optional] Disable fan art