Thumbnail/info database

[Efigalaxie]

Hello,
My name is David.
I started in this whole thing over 10 years ago. I had 2 girls in the late 90s and they managed to put a serious dent in my cd collection. I had another set of kids 10 years after the first two. I had many dvds and was determined that kids weren’t going to mess up my dvds, so I wanted a rip/store/stream solution. I found my dvd ripper of choice, I bought a 2 bay NAS and was off to find a player. I started with a western digital box that worked, but presented everything in a file name listing. I found my answer in a device from Dlink called the Boxee Box. That thing was dang near perfect. I used that until Boxee was sold off and support was abandoned. My father in law still uses 3 of them ...including my old unit. He is looking for another solution now since things are getting flaky on them now. After Boxee, I went to xbmc on a PC. Then I used Xbmc on a RPi. I got a Mi Box. Then I got a Nvidia Shield and used SPMC. I still have the shield, but Netflix locks up on it often. I have done all manner of reboot, reinstall etc..to no avail. I was able to get a 32gb ATV4K off Craigslist fairy cheap. I now have 6 two bay NAS units in raid one right now.....with 13tb of raid 1 space...26tb in straight space.

My concern is storage. I have near 5k movies plus numerous TV Shows. The local database is large....which is what killed the Mi Box for me. My shield is the 500gb version. I am wondering if there may be a way that you could give us the option to keep the database on the network on another device? I also use Emby, but the emby server must be up. I would simply like to keep the dB on one of my NAS units and point to it.

[timstephens24]

What kind of NAS do you have? If possible, you could run Emby or Plex on your NAS and use those as the backed database, or use MySQL on your NAS and have that hold the MrMC database.

[Efigalaxie]

They are all of the simplistic varieties. None have the power to be an Emby server. I am looking at something a bit more robust down the road, but the reality is that I am probably better off having a bunch of small units...in that any failure impacts only a portion of my library. I am already running a dedicated Emby Server. I have always wondered the point of running Kodi if I were running Emby......? why not simply use the Emby client.....which is improving all the time? That is a serious question. Can you answer that?

[timstephens24]

If you're already running Emby, then just use the native Emby client inside of MrMC to connect to it. The main reason to not use the Emby client (at least on the Apple TV) is that it uses the native tvOS video player so it will have to transcode.

[Efigalaxie]

My stuff is all M4V and MP4. So Emby will direct stream to MRMC as a client and transcode to it's own client because of differences in the media players used. Have I got that correct??

[timstephens24]

Yeah, your file will play directly with MrMC. With the Emby app it could transcode (and I really disliked the emby app but that's just personal preference), but I'm not sure what's in your MP4/M4V files since that's just a container like MKV.

[Montoya]

...I also use Emby, but the emby server must be up. I would simply like to keep the dB on one of my NAS units and point to it.

Do you have a lot of customization done in Emby for your movie and tvshows metadata ?

Because if not, I’m wondering if you have setup Emby to save your Movie and tvshow metadata to nfo and also let Emby save artwork to your media folders and disabled to let Emby save image paths within nfo files.

This way, all your metadata stays on your NAS, so you can choose in MrMC or Kodi to use the already present metadata from nfo and artwork in your media folders, instead of letting MrMC or Kodi to scrape metadata again when you add a media source.

With this setup, you are flexible in moving/deploying your media to a new NAS/PC/Laptop and keeps you database independent, from whatever software/media player/mediaserver package you choose to use in the future, which supports metadata from nfo.

[Efigalaxie]

Yes, I actually do metadata manually as I aquire shows and movies. After ripping a movie, I use something called Tiny Media Manager, which is awesome. So, yes, all my metadata already exists and is on the NAS units.

[koying]

MrMC supports the same "local" solution to relocate the user folder as SPMC (https://github.com/koying/SPMC/wiki/How ... MC-data%3F ; just replace spmc_env.properties with mrmc_env.properties)

That work both with internal and external storage.
Shield, specifically, also allows network storage via SMB (with path like "/storage/<NAS-name>" when set up), but if you have the 500Mb, it's not worth it, and mi box doesn't support network storage.

Will look into having a network storage relocation for non-shield...