2006-03-01, 17:41
i think it's a farily common setup to have a gigantic media library (let's say on a "media server" on the same lan as the xbox), and a small subset of the media library on the xbox, since the xbox only allows 1 hard drive (afaik). this means that xbmc users may spend a lot of time copying files back and forth to the xbox from the desktop with all the media files.
it would be excellent (and probably not terribly difficult) if users could load one xml file which would display all files in a user's media library, independent of the physical location of that file. an icon of some sort would indicate whether this file is present on the xbox's hard drive or not.
(if the media server cannot be contacted, the non-local files would either be greyed out or absent from the list altogether.)
if the user requests a file that's on the xbox hdd, that file is played. if the user requests a file that's not on the xbox hdd, that file is acquired automatically via the protocol of the user's choice (sftp, ftp, smb if it's supported, etc.) with a pretty percentage bar and whatnot. presumably, the last played file would be deleted off the local store if there's not enough room to acquire the file, but this should be configurable in a style similar to how tivo discards old programs when the hard drive is full.
i think this feature would provide a nice layer of abstraction between the logical notion of a "media library" and the physical hard drive on which that file is stored.
it would be excellent (and probably not terribly difficult) if users could load one xml file which would display all files in a user's media library, independent of the physical location of that file. an icon of some sort would indicate whether this file is present on the xbox's hard drive or not.
(if the media server cannot be contacted, the non-local files would either be greyed out or absent from the list altogether.)
if the user requests a file that's on the xbox hdd, that file is played. if the user requests a file that's not on the xbox hdd, that file is acquired automatically via the protocol of the user's choice (sftp, ftp, smb if it's supported, etc.) with a pretty percentage bar and whatnot. presumably, the last played file would be deleted off the local store if there's not enough room to acquire the file, but this should be configurable in a style similar to how tivo discards old programs when the hard drive is full.
i think this feature would provide a nice layer of abstraction between the logical notion of a "media library" and the physical hard drive on which that file is stored.
