I have a suggestion....
There has been a python script around for quite a while on xbmcscripts.com called "Kaleidascrape" that adds Kaleidascape functionality to xbmc, and it's really pretty cool. What it does is you queue up a Video File, and then run the script, and it adds a few video files of your choice to the playlist before the originally queued file, and it plays them all. You can add a folder for Movie Trailers, a folder for those Audio Intros for Dolby Digital or THX or whatever, a folder for the Studio Intros, if you'd like, and also a folder for Home Theater Intros, and it chooses one or two random videos from all the folders, depending on how many you set it to, and those are the videos it adds before the feature presentation. For those of you wondering what i mean by Home Theater Intro, these are generally elaborate Cinematic sequences which start with "Welcome to the Smith Family Theater" or something like that and end with "And now, your feature presentation." You can get these customized especially for you (generally costs at least 25 bucks, and depending on teh quality, may cost over a 100 for extremely high end ones), or you can get generic ones for free that would work for anybody.
However, this script has since been broken by changes in the way xbmc handles playlists, along with other changes probably. Somebody though updated it a few months ago, and they also added a couple of new featuers, including the ability to enable a trivia slideshow thing like they have before movies start in theaters, which I thought was a pretty cool feature, and you can make it play music from a particular directory while doing the slideshow, so I put a bunch of music from various movies in a directory and bought a pack of slides for exactly this sort of application for about 3 bucks from a guy over on avs forums i believe and it works great. Also, this guy was attempting to add add a function where it would automatically connect to the apple movie trailer database and grab a couple of random trailers from the "New" category and automatically queue those up instead of Trailers on your hard drive. I don't know if he ever got this working, but it would also be a great feature.
Anyway, I think it would be a great script to try to integrate into the skin, and make it slightly more user friendly. Right now, you have to do a bit of XML editing to tell it where to find the various files and how many of each to play and so on. I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to just make this customizable from within the skin, something that could be found under "Skin Options" as seems to be the trend of the last few months.
Here are some links to get a better idea of what I'm talking about:
Link to the broken script on XBMCScripts.com:
http://www.xbmcscripts.com/index.php?opt...ape%20v0.1
Link to the thread where the guy updated the script and added the Trivia Slides functionality (look in the second post):
http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?s...38697&st=0
Link to downloadable Intro Clips:
http://www.dvdloc8.com/list_dvd_clip.php
Link to Trivia Slides CD Thread:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=564456
Links to Home Theater Intros (can also find some people doing personalized intros on AVS Forums for cheap):
HIGH End (you can find them far cheaper other places, but still spendy..but REALLY cool):
http://www.htmarket.com/perdvdhomthe.html
Lower End than the link above, but still good, and also lower priced:
http://www.cinemawise.com/gallery.htm (I like the "Home Theater Animation" best)
http://store.customintros.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=20 (you can get these ones for only 12 bucks if you don't care about having your name in it, and only slightly more for personalizing it)
http://hometheaterintro.com/ (I like these least of all, but figured i'd link to them anyway)
Note that almost all of these have sample videos you can download, so if you don't care if the video is perfect and pristine DVD quality, you could just use these for free.
Here is a thread that shows you how to make your own pretty high quality intro with the name of your "theater" and everything in it for free
:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=715166
For a video of one of the many styles of intros you can make using this thread, check out the link here:
[url=http://interface.audiovideoweb.com/lnk/ca20win15017/GregPowers/Powers_Intro_DSL.wmv/play.asx][/url]
So, you could just integrate the script part, and add links to sites like these in the readme, instructing people how to go about adding their own intros. Anyway, its just a thought. I personally loved the Kaleidascrape script while it worked. It's amazing how jazzed for a movie some of those intro vids can get you.