Hi all! I'm a little new to UnRAID and even newer to the forums (first post!) but I thought I'd share what I've discovered recently.

 

I've been looking for a good way to stream movies (DVD, AVI's, Hi Def stuff) from my UnRAID shares to my laptop with XBMC on it via hamachi (which I also have installed on UnRAID) and came upon Xbox Media Center Streaming Protocol (XBMS[P]). Well, I've been checking out ccxstream for linux, and even though it is no longer supported, XBMC still can use it as an XBMSP source, and I've found that it is far more efficient than cifs/smb or UPNP for use over the internet or in places/distances where bandwidth is a limitation. DVD Movies actually seemed to stream with very little buffering and browsing the library was overall snappier.

 

Please forgive my linux nonpro-ness, but the following worked for me:

 

Download ccxstream slack build from here:

http://bozo.ovh.net/~keke/slack/10.1/ccxstream-1.0.15-i686-slack.tgz

 

I copied it to /boot/packages and installed it, then I located the configuration file in /etc/rc.d and edited it to suit my needs. Once that was done, I copied that to my /boot/packages directory as well to have it ready for boot.

 

For boot:

I edited my go file to install it at boot and copy the previously configured copy of the rc.ccxstream file back to /etc/rc.d/ and then start it.

 

installpkg ccxstream-1.0.15-i686-slack.tgz

cp /boot/packages/rc.ccxstream /etc/rc.d/

/etc/rc.d/rc.xccxstream

 

The configuration of the file is pretty straightforward, the only lines to worry about I believe are:

IP=

ROOTDIR=

 

In XBMC, it should automatically pop up as an XBMSP network source, so just add it and you should be browsing and watching via XBMSP in no time.

 

I'm sure some of this may have been redundant or even poor practice as I'm not really very good with linux, so I welcome any better solutions to install it and get it running. Anyway, I'm having fun with it. Also goes without saying that this is highly dependent on internet upstream, so YMMV, but on my 35/35 connection it works wonders, as long as my downstream is fairly robust wherever I'm at (haven't tested with Blu-Ray yet).

 

Anyway, hope this is useful!

 

-UrineBoy

Interesting application ... but why stream movies to a laptop when you can simply access the files directly via SAMBA/CIFS and have XBMC-on-laptop play them directly?

 

It seems like you went through a lot of run-around when a direct answer was always there to begin with (SAMBA/CIFS).

I've tried using smb/cifs over hamachi and even with the amount of upstream I have, it doesn't seem to be enough for a smooth experience. Still a bit more waiting and pausing every so often than I'd like. After checking out the XBMC forums, the conclusion I got is it didn't seem to be the way to go for VPN use over the internet. XBMSP seems advertised to do just that though and the XBMC forum posts that I've read concerning this protocol agree that XBMSP is the way to go for this particular use. Indeed, for home use though, SMB is what I use for my media center uses. Cheers!

 

-UrineBoy

I'm guessing it streams at a variable rate, possibly transcoding the source video into something more suitable for the connection. Did it seem to make a difference in visual quality, streaming instead of directly playing the files?

 

It's certainly interesting to know about the alternatives so I appreciate you sharing your findings.