Media sharing at home: multiple users, NAS

[DerBusIsVoll]

Hello All,

I'd like to put a scenario in front of you which I cannot resolve myself anymore:

I'd like to be able to share our ebooks at home with all family members. Best would be to use my NAS where all Videos, Images & Audio files are already shared from, namely a Fritzbox with an attached USB drive. As you may guess, my kids are minor an so should not read some of the literature I have collected.

Given the above, I have organized the books into a family library and an adult library, and copied those onto the NAS's harddisk. Calibre installs on the respective computers are pointing to the respective NAS locations. Unfortunately this approach does not support mobile ebook readers like the android devices we are using, and cross library searches are not possible. Also access to the library from outside are not possible, except I would dedicate a computer running all the time.

So, my thoughts are severalfold:
- Calibre content server shall be made available as a piece of source code compilable under linux 2.6 for mipsel architecture, running under an apache webserver?
- Calibre content server allows different users to log in, and permissions can be given to browse a single or several libraries on a per user base
- Calibre content server can actually open several libraries and make them browsable

I'm sure that my thoughts are not very broad for my lack of experience using Calibre, but I'm very happy to listen to your ideas how I can adress my challenges.

Brgds DerBusIsVoll

[ilovejedd]

Combine both libraries into one and just add tags to the books (e.g. family, adult). The calibre content server already includes its own web server so no need for apache. If you plan on using the calibre content server, you'll need to use a separate port for each user with the necessary username/password and access restrictions.

e.g.

calibre-server -p 8080 --password "dad" --username "dad"
calibre-server -p 8081 --password "mom" --username "mom"
calibre-server -p 8082 --password "kids" --username "kids" --restriction "family"

However, the above would give you a different URL for each one.

If you want something more robust, the only way I could think of is for you to write your own scripts (in asp, php, python, etc) which would use calibre's metadata.db similar to chaley's Calibre PHP Server.

There's work being done on making calibre support a multi-user environment but I wouldn't expect to see a release anytime soon.

[DerBusIsVoll]

That was quick - thanks indeed. And your solution of using different URLs is acceptable, provided Android tools like fbreader can handle these while adding an OPDS catalogue.
That leaves the question of running calibre-server on my NAS, using mipsel code base. Any thoughts on that?

[ilovejedd]

People have been able to compile Calibre on ARM (see [HOW TO] Install Calibre in Intel-Based NAS (and ARM-based NAS), [How To] Calibre on Android e-Reader (Nook Touch)). Not sure about MIPS but it might be worth a try.

[DerBusIsVoll]

Excellent.
I don't wanna claim that I will be able to conduct that work, but will give it a shot.

[DerBusIsVoll]

Hello All,

I've been struggling to build calibre-server for mipsel. While reading, I came across a much simpler solution which fits my problem quite nicely:

Calibre2Opds produces all necessary files - as it seems - and runs on my apache web server on the fritzbox, without the need of recompile.

To improve my personal comfort, I have one question:

Has anybody seen or created a plugin to run Calibre2Opds directly from the Calibre GUI? I could not make google answer that to me yet.

Brgds DerBusIsVoll

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by DerBusIsVoll

To improve my personal comfort, I have one question:

Has anybody seen or created a plugin to run Calibre2Opds directly from the Calibre GUI? I could not make google answer that to me yet.

Nope, I don't think an integrated plug-in exists. I don't think the programmer for Calibre2OPDS is familiar with Python so that's probably the reason.