So here's an odd one for you all... :P
So I'd like to be able to serve my media files from an attached drive on my tablet. Afaik, the only way to have an Android device act as a server is to sync your media to it, which requires a PlexPass that I don't currently have. Previously I was able to install/run the server from one PC, and use mapped drives from another PC to include media on another system within the same library. This worked fine but the truth is that I'm really getting annoyed that my PC has to stay stationary at my desk to keep the drive attached and be able to serve my media to other TV's; even when I'm not the one watching the media...
When I played a movie through the mapped drive, I did not notice any network delays so it appeared to be stable enough to do. That said, I'd like to do a similar setup with my tablet but my old A500 wireless is not as stable. With a little work I was able to get a proper SMB server running on my tablet, which should allow me to get the drives mapped to my PC. Honestly, I really don't mind having the server run from my PC with mapped drives to the tablet, provided I do not need to keep my drive(s) plugged into the PC itself, and that I do not take too big of a hit performance-wise.
The difference between the setup with the PC and the tablet is that my tablet is used as my primary player, and the PC was only hosting the files without the care of performance as a player. If I were to attach the drive to the tablet, then force the media through a mapped drive to the server on my PC, then have it stream back through the network to play on the same tablet hosting the files in the first place, how bad of a performance hit do you think it will cause?
Usually I would just try it out and see what happens but in this case rearranging the current hardware setup will be quite a venture! I would really appreciate any thoughts on this idea before I go ahead and risk putting my back out moving the cabinets around! :wacko:
(Another thought I had would be to write a plugin that will receive the network urls, recognize the server name as the device, and translate the network paths to local ones for playback. This idea seems a bit too similar to how PlexPass's sync is setup so I don't know what the general opinion of this idea will be? Not to mention I am still new to Plex dev and do not even know if this would be possible?...Any thoughts?)
(P.S. Because of the excellent hard work you have all done, I now can finally say to any woman with confidence....I LOVE P.M.S.!!...and as an old school XBMC Python plugin dev from back in the Xbox days (No1CanTeL >> for those who remember! ;)), I LOVE being back in an XBMC-like environment again!)
(P.P.S. Once I get a better grip on the non-pythonic style of plugins/channels, you will be hearing back from me with some new additions ;))
