There are a number of tweaks that I had to make on XBMC to make it work a little better with my setup.
First – since I am using MySQL I had to add some indexes and make a small change to the MySQL server.
By default it appears that MySQL wants to do a reverse DNS lookup to all client connections. This makes the initial connection very slow, to disable this behavior add the following to my.ini in the [mysqld] section:
skip-name-resolve
The following indexes also improve performance:
use XBMC_video;
ALTER TABLE movie ADD INDEX idMovie(idMovie);
ALTER TABLE movie ADD INDEX idFile(idFile);
Another change that is essential because of the shared MySQL database is the sharing of the thumbnail directory – otherwise the thumbnails will only appear on the XBMC client that discovers the media. To get around this I created a symbolic link on the Linux box to the shared Thumbnail directory on Windows.
Connecting to Windows shares from Linux has caused me all sorts of issues. I initially tried mounting shares in fstab, but if the Windows box wasn’t available during Linux boot the shares were unavailable. I switched to automounter which resolved the issue.
There are some other SAMBA tweaks to improve performance – in theory this was supposed to prevent video from stopping if it was paused or looking at info. So far it is only partially successful.
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
Finally, ever time I upgrade something in XBMC or a supporting component the autostart fails to actually, you know, autostart XBMC. To fix this edit the /etc/uxlaunch/uxlaunch file with the correct home directory.
