[doveman2]

So, one thing you're after is hiding library items that are on drives, not currently connected. right?
My idea was to automatically add a media filter to a source once we know it's offline. That media filter would only show items of that source, where we have a local copy. It should of course be possible to remove/add this filter manually. While this is definitely on my todo/wishlist, it's probably sth. I'm going to work on after all the rest is done.

The next thing is, that xbmc doesn't loose data when you unconnect a drive?!? Because I'm using external drives with my laptop and I never had any issues, as long as l don't do a "clean library" while drives are not connected.

The big question is, how do we find out if a source is unavailable/available? With usb drives, we could probably listen the some events of the operating system. with NAS drives, I could see different approaches... so, any ideas about that?

Hi Fice

Perhaps one idea is for XBMC to create a file in the root of the removeable drive (something individual for each drive like XBMC123.txt, where 123 is sourced from the drive's serial number or something else that could be queried from the drive, or otherwise just a sequential sequence, so the first drive XBMC would create XBMC-RD1.txt, the second XBMC-RD2.txt, obviously it would need to keep a note of which numbers it had already used) and then check for that file and if not found, decide the drive is currently unavailable. You might need to allow time for the drive to be woken from sleep state though as most USB drives seem to do that.

I'd like to suggest an idea of having the option to still see the unavailable movies in the library, with either a simple "Offline" icon to indicate which are not currently available, or even (perhaps in Movie Information) further details, such as the name of the drive the files are on. It's nice to be able to browse through one's entire library to choose from or even just for checking what we have, even if we need to connect up a drive to actually be able to play them.

I guess you might want to look at supressing the "Media not available, remove from library?" pop-up for files marked as on removable media (or globally if that's not possible), as it's a bit too easy to accidentally say Yes to this and then need to update the Library to get the movie back in it. Ideally, if possible this popup would be replaced with a simple notification like "Drive xxx needs to be connected to play this movie", with just an OK button to close it.