Ok, so this whole jukebox thing is new to me in that i never had the need for it before.
Anyways, so i bought a Popcorn Hour and so did my friend who isnt a IT consultant and he immediately asked "can you show movie covers and stuff and then play the movie"
to which i replied "probably" - and the immediate retort was "set it up for me plix" (and yes, he said plix)
So i fumble around the net for awhile looking for something and come across mymovies.dk and think.. looks good and so on.. i then add yamj to serve the stuff from the database.
But jesus christ.. i would rather configure an entire rack of servers with complicated servers, domains and so on than do this.. it is very complicated.. particularly getting the Popcorn hour to see it correctly.
I then come across Kroozbox and this is the first break.. but what a pain to get it to work with mymovies.
I keep seeing references to this PVD and think.. hmm, lets try that.. and Voila.. with PVD and Kroozbox it does Exactly what i want with no major fuss, no installing MSSQL 2005 (ill get to that)
My Technical setup is as follows:
1 Virtual 2008 File server (where all the movies are located)
1 Virtua Windows Home server (where PVD and Kroozbox runs)
1 Popcorn hour
I elected to seperate the PVD and kroozbox from the 2008 server, simply because its easy to setup a virtual server and it seperates the functions nicely.
So the PVD Reads the two shares on the File server for the Videos (all .AVI or .MKV - no ISO or .VOB) and it works beatifully, love the fact that you can manually elect to update the folder view
Kroozbox then reads the PVD database and serves the data nicely. In contrast to the other setups i only had to point it at the database.. Effing beautiful!!!
I love the fact its a dynamic system in that i dont have to generate static html and so on and so forth.
The problem with mymovies over pvd seems to be that is geared towards people who rip their dvds to ISO's or MKV's and it relies on MSSQL2005 which it doesnt uninstall btw, and it leaves tons of shit on the system once you uninstall it, which requires manual cleanup.. I am thouroughly unimpressed.
Anyways, sorry for the negative segway.
I love PVD and Kroozbox together, it is a perfect fit and seems to me the very best solution for serving the popcorn hour.
So a HUGE thank you!
