This is a standalone web interface for XBMC which allows users to browse the library and download or stream the movies and TV shows in it.
- Browse and filter movies and TV shows
- Browse seasons and episodes for a TV show
- Stream media using an M3U playlist with one click
- User management (application requires login), including logging to see who's doing what
- Supports multiple XBMC instances and allows easy switching between them
- No configuration files
- PHP 5.4
- allow_url_fopen = On in php.ini
- Apache with .htaccess support enabled
- XBMC 12 "Frodo" (seeking works reliably on v13 "Gotham" only)
The following steps assume that your shell user is able to use the sudo command, that you're running a Debian/Ubuntu-based operating system, that you're going to use Apache as web server and that its document root is located in /var/www.
Run the following commands, one by one, in the exact order shown here:
sudo su
apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 php5-gd php5-cli php5-sqlite php5-json git curl
a2enmod rewrite expires
service apache2 restart
cd /var/www
git clone git://github.com/Jalle19/xbmc-video-server.git
cd xbmc-video-server
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
php composer.phar install
./src/protected/yiic createinitialdatabase
./src/protected/yiic setpermissions
After running the commands above you'll have to modify Apache's default site configuration to allow .htaccess files to be used. This means you'll have to edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default and change this:
<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
into this:
<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
After saving the file you must restart Apache using service apache2 restart for the changes to take effect.
After running the commands above you'll need to add the following to the file /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf:
<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
You'll also need to edit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and change the line ;date.timezone = to something like this: date.timezone = Europe/Helsinki. Look at http://us2.php.net/manual/en/datetime.configuration.php#113068 for possible timezone values.
After saving the file you must restart Apache using service apache2 restart for the changes to take effect.
To update your copy of the software to the latest version, run the following commands (assuming the same directory structure and setup as described under Installation):
cd /var/www/xbmc-video-server
git pull
php composer.phar install
./src/protected/yiic migrate --interactive=0
- Download the XAMPP installer from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/ and run it
- Uncheck all components except Server / Apache and Program Languages / PHP
- Follow the instructions until the installation is complete (ignore any warnings). Don't open the XAMPP control panel just yet.
- Open the file
C:\xampp\php\php.iniand remove the leading semi-colon from the line reading;extension=php_openssl.dll. Save the file. - Download the Composer installer from http://getcomposer.org/download/ and run it
- Browse to
C:\xampp\php\php.exewhen the installer asks for the path to php.exe
- Browse to
- Download the msysgit installer from http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/ and run it
- Use the default options on all screens except at Adjusting your PATH environment, there you must select Run Git from the Windows Command Prompt.
- Start the XAMPP Control Panel
- Click the Config button and check Apache under Autostart of modules, then click Save
- Start Apache by clicking the Start button in the middle of the window
- While still in the XAMPP Control Panel, click Shell to launch a command prompt in the XAMPP directory. Then, run the following commands, one by one:
cd htdocs
git clone git://github.com/Jalle19/xbmc-video-server.git
cd xbmc-video-server
composer install
.\src\protected\yiic createinitialdatabase
Open the XAMPP Control Panel and click the Shell button to launch a command prompt in the XAMPP directory. Then, run the following commands one by one:
cd htdocs\xbmc-video-server
git pull
composer install
.\src\protected\yiic migrate --interactive=0
-
Download the XAMPP installer for Mac OS X from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/ and run it. Follow the instructions until the setup is complete. Once completed it will automatically run Apache and open the web server test page.
-
Open
/Applications/XAMPP/etc/php.iniand remove the leading semi-colon from the line reading;extension=php_openssl.dll, then save the file. -
Run
/Applications/XAMPP/manager-osx.app, go to the Manage Servers tab, select Apache and click Restart. -
Download and install Git from http://git-scm.com/downloads/. You may have to Ctrl-right-click (hold the Ctrl key while right-clicking) the file and select Open in order to be able to install it.
-
Open a terminal and run the following commands one by one:
cd /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs
git clone git://github.com/Jalle19/xbmc-video-server.git
cd xbmc-video-server
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -d detect_unicode=Off
php -d detect_unicode=Off composer.phar install
./src/protected/yiic createinitialdatabase
./src/protected/yiic setpermissions
Open a terminal and run the following commands:
cd /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs/xbmc-video-server
git pull
php -d detect_unicode=Off composer.phar install
./src/protected/yiic migrate --interactive=0
Once the installation is complete, use your web browser to browse to /xbmc-video-server on your web server (if you did the installation steps on your local machine the URL would be http://localhost/xbmc-video-server). You will be presented with a login form. Log in with username "admin" and password "admin" (you'll be able to change this later).
Once logged in, you will be asked to configure a backend. A backend is an instance of XBMC that the application connects to and displays library contents from. Here you should specify XBMC's hostname and port as well as the username and password for XBMC's web server.
If you specify more than one backend, a "Change backend" menu item will appear which allows you to switch which backend is being used. This way you don't have to install this application once for every XBMC instance you have, or you can use it to connect to a friend's library (provided he has opened the relevant ports in his firewall).
The "Proxy Location" setting is a bit more exotic. Without it, all requests to the XBMC API (including the URLs to your movies and TV shows) are in the form of http://user:pass@hostname:port/API_PATH, which means in order to use the application over the Internet you'd have to forward the right port to the machine running XBMC. It also means you'd be exposing the XBMC API credentials to anyone using your application. What the "Proxy Location" setting does is replace the http://user:pass@hostname:port/ part with the specified location.
Let's say you have installed XBMC Video Server on one machine, and XBMC is running on a different machine:
http://xbmc-video-server.example.com/xbmc-video-server/
What we want to do is map e.g. /xbmc to http://xbmc.example.com:8080/, this way you don't have to forward the 8080 port to the computer running XBMC.
To make this work you have to configure your web server to provide a reverse proxy. To do this, open the file /etc/apache2/sites-available/default (or /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf if you're running Ubuntu 13.10 or newer) and add the following inside the <VirtualHost *:80> block:
AllowEncodedSlashes On
<Location /xbmc>
ProxyPass http://xbmc.example.com:8080
ProxyPassReverse http://xbmc.example.com:8080
RequestHeader set Authorization "Basic eGJtYzp4Ym1j"
</Location>
After saving the file also have to run sudo a2enmod headers proxy_http && sudo service apache2 restart.
In the example above the "Proxy Location" field in the XBMC Video Server settings should contain /xbmc. The "eGJtYzp4Ym1j" part is username:password encoded with Base64 (in the example the credentials are the default xbmc:xbmc).
You should use a randomly generated long string as location (see Security implications)
Once you've configured the application you should be able to browse your library. You can configure new users from the Settings menu. There are three user roles; user, administrator and spectator. A standard user cannot see (and cannot access by other means) the settings pages, a spectator can't stream or download anything (just "spectate"), and an administrator can naturally do everything.
This application is insecure by virtue of design. Since there is only one set of credentials for XBMCs API and the only way to authenticate from a media player (such as VLC) is by passing the credentials in the URL, it is impossible to protect XBMC from malicious users. You can avoid exposing the actual API credentials to your users by configuring a proxy location, but on the other hand that exposes the whole API on an authentication-less URL. Thus, if you use a proxy location, you should specify a non-guessable one so that outsiders can't accidentally gain access.
Regardless of whether you use a reverse proxy or not, your smb:// login credentials will be visible in the URLs generated by the application. If this is a concern you should consider mounting the network share in your OS instead of via XBMC.
The application comes with pre-compiled CSS files. If you wish to re-compile the files on the fly you need to preload the "less" component and optionally change the path to node and lessc. All of this is done in src/protected/config/main.php.
XBMC (http://xbmc.org/)
Yii framework (http://www.yiiframework.com/)
Yiistrap (http://www.getyiistrap.com/)
Yii-less (https://github.com/Crisu83/yii-less)
yii-consoletools (https://github.com/Crisu83/yii-consoletools)
eventviva/php-image-resize (https://github.com/eventviva/php-image-resize)
phpass (http://www.openwall.com/phpass/) (https://github.com/hautelook/phpass)
Zend framework (http://framework.zend.com/)
Bootswatch (http://bootswatch.com/)
Font Awesome (http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/)
jQuery Unveil (http://luis-almeida.github.io/unveil/)
typeahead.js (http://twitter.github.io/typeahead.js/)
This software is licensed under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3.