[THagen]

Yes, I know the reason for the library. I am asking because I have a lot of devices running Kodi, some of which has a (very) limited amount of memory available. I know I can use mysql or UPnP to centralize the library information, but that would require an additional unit to run these services. So, that's why I was hoping there was some way I could show the information stored in the nfo-files without using the library.

I did some tests and it's not a good idea to read this info from the nfo files, especially on your lower powered devices.
The only way to get it reasonable fast is by caching the content in memory, which would consume a lot of memory which you don''t have ;-)
Why not use the Kodi library ? It does not take a lot of memory or space to use that, it's very efficient.

I hear you, and I'm beginning to lean towards the library solution myself, although I would (strongly) prefer to have all the information centralized. After all, all images (folder, movie, fanart etc.) is stored within the same directory as the movie itself (like the nfo-file), and displaying these images doesn't harm performance that much. I really don't see why displaying some of the information from the nfo-file (which after all is text only) should have such a huge additional negative impact on performance. But, if that's what happens...