[darkie]

1. does the xbmc version of python provide hooks to access smb shares natively?  i found a pure python implementation of the smb client side protocol and have been able to get that working nicely but i was just wondering if there already exists a way to do this?  i know that xbmc.player() can access files over smb shares if the "url" is constructed properly but i haven't found a way to do this using, for example, nt.listdir(dir).

no, this is not possible.

2. xbmc obviously parses xml.  is this exposed anywhere in the python interpreter?  in order to bootstrap to the mysql database, i need a place to store the hostname, database name, user, and password.  i was thinking of adding this to my xboxmediacenter.xml file.  if there was a way for python scripts to get access to the parsed config file or to call the xml parser on a file, that would be handy.

python has some xml parser modules in it's library but i haven't add those yet to python for xbmc (just forgot to add it, but will do it soon).
if you read some documentation on http://www.python.org you will see that there is support for xml files.

3. does anyone know of a pure python mysql client interface module?  in order to learn python, i wrote a python module that supports connecting and authenticating to mysql over a socket, select, insert, update, and deleting of rows in the database, creating and dropping databases.  it does what i need it to do and i'm willing to contribute this to the project... but i'd like to add some more documentation to it and use it in a useful script so that i can make sure i'm happy with the api.  if there already exists such a beast, then there's no point in me working any further on it.

there is a pure mysql python client but it is only available as a python dll module. and if there is only one big problem left for python it is loading dll modules and especially if they are not compiled for the xbox. so currently not possible.
and if you want to share what you already have, please. i think a lot of other user find this usefull.

the avi starts to play as expected but when i hit stop on the xbox remote, the screen goes black and the xbmc interface never comes back.  i haven't waited to see what happens when the entire avi finishes.  i am using the march 9, 2004 build... is this a known problem?  if you replace the avi file with a mp3 file, it seems to work fine.  any ideas?

fixed in current cvs

5. someone mentioned in the forum about having buttons bound to python scripts... it would be fantastic if a user could add a button to the main xbmc menu (e.g. mythtv) that launches a python script.  at the moment, the only way i could launch my scripts is to go into the settings ->scripts screen and pick the name of my script.  i tried creating a shortcut to the python script so that i could pick the shortcut under programs but this did not work.  i tried placing my python script in an apps folder but it didn't work either.  is there any other way to launch a python script other than through the settings screen?

binding scripts to buttons is possible. have a look at cvs/skinning.txt. somewhere at the end of the document there is this

button control:

 <control>
...
...
<script>q:\scripts\update_tvguide.py</script>
 </control>