Is there a way to point Myth at network folders via SAMBA or something similar to access my extensive library of Music, Movies, and Pictures that exist currently in the Windows world?

I did some searching in the forum and only found reference to using locally attached USB which required formatting... not a viable option.

Also, has anyone had experience with connecting it to a NAS? Ultimately, I would like to have my data stored on a large NAS with RAID that is available to my Windows and Myth boxes. I prefer to archive the media in the Windows world and just access it using Myth (I've ran into too many problems importing DVD's and Music with Myth).

I'm not very familiar with Linux commands so specific help would be great!

Yea, Knoppmyth can access media stored on a Windows server. Search the forum for samba a ton of topics about this.

I use this guide on the wiki.

Samba client and server setup
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... +and+samba

Basically how it works is Samba connects to Windows shares and AUTOFS connects the shares at boot and keeps them connected. You can also use a config file /etc/fstab to connect the shares but I don't prefer that method.
Autofs is more complex to use that fstab method but only have to set it up once.

Here are the commands I used to get this setup (replace variables). To get into console ALT+CTRL+F1. ^ end of a single line command.



above taken from this post...
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7732



Depends on the communication protocol the NAS uses, if it uses a standard protocol like NFS, or CIFS (Windows sharing). Sure you can use the above autofs/samba method or NFS.

http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=NFSHowTo

If your NAS uses some other protocol maybe, more research may be in order. You know what NAS solution you are using? I was checking out a free BSD based NAS distro that looks pretty intresting.

http://www.freenas.org/

I'll have to give all this a shot this week when I have some time to "play"

Thanks for a VERY detailed answer! I think this is exactly what i'm looking for.

As for the NAS... currently i'm using a couple ximeta devices which need a proprietary driver (haven't looked for a linux flavor yet). While thinking about it some more, in the interim, I think I will just make my life easy and set up a sharepoint on one of my Windows boxes that is attached to the NAS, and just run through that to make sure everything works. Then i'll tackle getting the NAS to work directly.

Thanks for the link on the BSD NAS... looks interesting. I've been searching for an inexpensive NAS solution that will leverage my existing HD purchases.

You may be in luck looks like there are some drivers on Ximeta's site for linux.

http://code.ximeta.com/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/wiki/Debian

Everything went well, with the exception of the syntax on the logical links... I had to flip them around backwards to get it to work (and mod the path a bit to match). I am now able to see my remote folders within Myth, and after 24 long hours of scanning 160GB of music to get it into the DB, it's finally up and running. Upside is that it works, downside is that Myth runs excruciatingly slow now. It's either because it doesn't like pulling data over the net, or because it's just slow with that much info in the DB.

Now I have a new question though... I have DVD's that I ripped to HD with DVD Shrink, which replicates the formal DVD format on the hard drive. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to what DVD's it listed in the library (All in the same format, folder name, vob's and ts's inside). I end up with a mixture of regular names that don't play anything, and VTS 01 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. that appear to be the videos.

What format does Myth expect the DVD's to look like on the drive so I can get coverart, descriptions, etc - and have the names look right.

Sorry I get the command backasswards every time.



Some ppl have seen problems with large music databases. I set MythMusic to ignore the Id3 tag so music scans faster into database and seems to work fine for me (15GB approx). If I recall and you want to set MythMusic to ignore ID3 tags you have to config MythMusic to search for music in empty or directory /myth/tmp, scan, and set back to /myth/music and scan again.

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... =mythmusic


Bascially you would want to try to congiure xine to open your VIDEO_TS folder to get menu etc. Not sure if it can be done, recall another similar post without resolution. Maybe Google and search Gossamer lists for more info on that one.
The way MythVideo inetends to see files is as either .ISO files or .avi depending on how you import them.






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Will Myth keep everything organized based on directory structure if you do this?

One thing you may or may not have a problem with if you're using Samba/Autofs: I find pretty frequently when I reboot my Windows machine that stores my media that the shares are not always automatically reconnected. I have to ssh into the machine and stop autofs like so:

/etc/init.d/autofs stop

Then I'll usually get a message like

Could not stop 12011

So I have to manually kill whichever ones it could not stop, like so:

kill 12011

Then restarting autofs everything works OK again

/etc/init.d/autofs start

Yep, ran into that one today when I got home from work, I had read that previously about SAMBA before - I'm hoping when I get this testing done and try the linux drivers for my NAS that will clear the problem up - and increase performance.

Were you able to get the Linux drivers working for your Ximeta network drive?

I have a Ximeta Netdisk and was trying a couple of months back to install the driver and get it functioning, but it seemed to be too much for my feeble mind (well, in terms of Linux anway!).

One thing is that I could never find a mount command that would work, but perhaps I didn't have the driver properly installed...

What mount command do you use?

Any advice you can give me on installing the Ximeta drivers?

It appeared that while Ximeta had a Debian Linux driver available, it wasn't a proper match for the kernel version included with knoppmyth. I had to follow the procedure of compiling the driver for our version (Knoppmyth 5C7) before I could install it.

Now that 5D1 is out, perhaps the "off the shelp" Debian driver will work?

Thanks,

Greg