Media Playback Routing

[trimble]

I'd like to minimize network traffic in my home and have a general question about how media are served-up to MDs. Does all media get routed through the Core when played back? I'm wondering because all of my MDs have large internal hard drives which are used by LMCE for storage. If files that reside on an MD's own hard drive(s) stay off the network when played back by that MD, that would be very cool and would prompt me to locate media primarily used by a particular MD on that MD, rather than on the Core.

Regards,
Mark

[tschak909]

The answer to this is slightly complicated.

We have an extensive auto-mounter script that lives in /etc/auto.plutoStorageDevices.

This script does database lookups to determine how to mount a particular directory.

sometimes, NFS mounts to the MD are used, sometimes SMB mounts are used. This is determined by the device template # of the share in the device tree.

If you copy a file to \\dcerouter, then it all filters through samba, because samba is running on the core, and the file accesses are therefore going through the core, and the automounter is mounting remote shares as NFS or SMB as appropriate.

-Thom

[merkur2k]

I believe the OP is more concerned with what happens when a media file is played on an MD vs where that media file exists. This is not completely clear to me either, but I think it is smart enough to know when media is local to the MD and plays it directly.

[colinjones]

Yes it mounts locally. All media files ultimately get resolved to a path such as /home/public/data/audio/sharename/file.mp3 ... from the database, and all MDs mirror the same folder structure using the mounts and symlinks so the same path can be used by all MDs to access the same file. If that file happens to be on a local drive, then the automounter is just going to mount that drive locally, the rest is just normal file access across a local mount, so no network access (is how I understand it) .... I don't think the scripts need to be smart, the initial design was smart so that the scripts didn't need to be!