How to share Playstate and/or Display settings between computers

NOTE: this topic has not been updated to reflect the display.db change in Hydra.

If you have multiple Windows Media Center PC’s in your household and use a centralised location for your media, you might want to share the playstate and display information between these computers to get a uniform look and feel.

Basic watched status sharing
There are two ways for playstate sharing. If all you need is a basic watched status synchronization between multiple systems, you can use the follw.it plugin. That plugin will sync the watched status information with any Media Browser installation you have anywhere in the world.

This has a built in advantage that will allow multiple computers connected to the same follw.it account to become synchronized with each other if they are in the same house or anywhere else in the world.

If you ever need to rebuild your local database, your watched statuses will also be automatically populated from follw.it.

Keep in mind that the follw.it plugin will only sync watched status (“I watched the movie / I did not watch the movie”). Not complete playstate. If you want to be able to resume playback of a media file on another system in your household, keep reading…**

In this tutorial we’re going to move the existing display and playstate folders to a new location that is shared on the network. This shared path is then going to be defined in the MediaBrowserXml.config file.

For this we have an imaginary household with the following:

  • A main Windows Media Center PC called “htpc-livingroom” which has your movies stored in D:\Movies. This folder is shared as “movies” on your network.
  • A secondary Windows Media Center PC called “htpc-bedroom” which has the same media collection “movies”.

Shared playstate is not currently available while using experimental SQLITE. This is still experimental and simply does not work. (as of 2.2.4 you can use both SQLite and shared playstate & display settings)

Playstate sharing?

Media Browser tracks which movies you’ve watched. This information is stored in a folder called “playstate” in “C:\ProgramData\MediaBrowser\Cache\” by default.

Important note:
in order to effectively share the playstate you will need to configure your Media Collections on all computers with identical paths.

This means you will need to point your Media Collection “Movies” to \\htpc-livingroom\movies on all computers, including the computer that actually has the media stored locally in D:\Movies.

If you do not do this, Media Browser considers the different locations (D:\Movies and \\htpc-livingroom\movies as two separate things and will create playstate information for each location, resulting in unexpected behaviour.

It’s also considered a best practice to use UNC paths. More details about this can be found here (See the section “Network Locations”). When using UNC paths, understand that case sensitivity does currently matter. \mediasvr\movies and \MEDIASVR\Movies will be considered different paths and shared playstate and/or display will not work. Input the necessary UNC pathname exactly the same on all shared systems.

Display sharing?

You can set your own views, sorting and grouping options in Media Browser for your Media Collections. This information is stored in a folder called “display” in C:\ProgramData\MediaBrowser\Cache\ by default.

Either one or both of the above can be shared between computers.

Moving these folders

Part 1

First create a new folder on “htpc-livingroom”. For example D:\MediaBrowser. Share this folder as “MediaBrowser” with read-write permissions for everyone.

Now create a new subfolder in D:\MediaBrowser called “UserSettings”.

Navigate to “C:\ProgramData\MediaBrowser\Cache\” and cut the folders “display” and “playstate” and paste them in “D:\MediaBrowser\UserSettings”

The end result will be:

D:\MediaBrowser\UserSettings\display
D:\MediaBrowser\UserSettings\playstate

Part 2

Once you have done this navigate back to the directory “C:\ProgramData\MediaBrowser” and use a plain-text editor such as Notepad (not a word processor like MS Word) to open the file called MediaBrowserXml.config.

Look for an entry in this file that starts with <UserSettingsPath>
There should also be an end tag that looks like </UserSettingsPath>.

Between these tags is where you need to put the path to your new UserSettings location. In this example it would be \\htpc-livingroom\MediaBrowser\UserSettings

So the end result will be:

<UserSettingsPath>\\htpc-livingroom\MediaBrowser\UserSettings</UserSettingsPath>

Then save and close that file. MediaBrowser will now use your new location for UserSettings on the computer called “htpc-livingroom”.

Repeat Part 2 of this tutorial on the computer called “htpc-bedroom”. On this second computer the path will still be \\htpc-livingroom\MediaBrowser\UserSettings because our goal is to use the same shared path.

Once this is done you are now sharing the playstate and display information on both your machines. Changes on one computer are reflected on the other.

Additional information

You can move the display folder and playstate information independently. For example, you might want to share playstate information, but not the display settings because in the bedroom you want different views. In that case don’t move the display folder from “C:\ProgramData\MediaBrowser\Cache\”.

If you have previously set views on the main computer, these will now also be used on the secondary machine. If you want to start from scratch, delete the contents of the “display” folder in “D:\MediaBrowser\UserSettings\display”.

The same applies to previous playstate information. In that case you will need to delete the contents of the “playstate” folder in “D:\MediaBrowser\UserSettings\playstate”.

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