[dmdsoftware]

I strongly doubt that XBMC needs to download the whole file to scan it for library. Otherwise scanning through a whole library via SMB would take ages. And it doesn't. Plex should be similar and I'm led to believe that we are simply accessing stuff the "wrong" way. Or maybe it's just wishful thinking on my behalf, who knows

I'll check the discussion on Plex forums, thx.

What I can see happen when XBMC scrapes media is that it tries to figure out what kind of media it is (from the file extension) and then passes it to the most appropriate media tool to parse the information from it. This could possibly be overridden I would assume. Plugin like PseudoTV live has its own scrapers to determine duration, etc, to allow for seeking into media files. It uses the same media tools XBMC uses. But the fact it is making the calls within the plugin itself would suggest one could do the same (as a program plugin) and implement your own code to handle the same. I'm talking about scraping for purposes of starting playback at a certain time. I'm not sure if they override the seeking after the XBMC player has already started playback.