[raspberry_pd]

So in theory I could save the TVDB and TMDB a lot of trouble, and perhaps even speed up my library scanning a little, by storing local versions of meta images on my NAS? Cool.

Local artwork will definitely speed up scanning. It will also give you more consistent results as you will be able to select higher quality artwork. In addition, your artwork will always be available should you add another client, whereas internet hosted artwork has a habit of disappearing (this point is important when adding extra clients to a shared library).

Hmmm, wonder if your texturecache script can convert from the cached filenames to real filenames and copy them from cache to my NAS? I suspect it can, time to read the full documentation

No, it can't actually - there's already the built-in library "export" option for that. However, you'll just be exporting your cached artwork, which will contain resized and lower quality versions of the original artwork so it's not really an ideal solution IMHO. You're better off using something like Ember Media Manager to organise your local artwork (using the highest quality available) and metadata.

I was trying to do what popcornmix suggested earlier in this thread here might help speed things up. I lurv speed However it sounds like I was fishing without bait and I can't interpret these results anyway

Here's my results:

Movies
http://pastebin.com/N0MRqh6A

TV
http://pastebin.com/wG4f2GHW

That looks like it's working normally. For Movies, all your posters and fanarts were already cached, so nothing more needed to be cached. However for TV Shows your cache was missing 21 items so they were added to the cache. Now your texture cache should be fully populated and the GUI not wasting any more time encoding artwork as you browse through your movies and tv shows.

Thanks for the great tips and help MilhouseVH, sensational. Unfortunately Ember didn't install first time, but I'll try again on another machine later. I've been considering how best to try setting up NFS for another speed improvement over my current SMB connection to my NAS (which is a not especially fast Drobo unit).

Do you think it's worthwhile opening a dedicated site somewhere with nothing but a quick guide to maximizing XBMC performance? I see lots of tips here and there and everywhere and that's great, but it feels like a central guide, or ever 'cheat sheat' would be a beacon for a lot of users.