[SandmanCL]

There are so many suggested approaches to how this can be solved, so I figured I'd might as well toss another idea in here and see what comes of it

If xbmc could display offline content in a darker gray font it would easily be identified as such. This concept could be used in Video library mode to indicate a movie stored on DVD or even a computer which is currently turned off.

I currently store all my media on a loud, power-hungry file server and don't have a particular problem keeping it all online. However, due to the power requirements and the price of electricity in California, my monthly utility bill is quite high and I need to rethink how I store it all. My current server draws about 400 watts which is excessive with the advent of silent "green" hard drives that draw something like 10 watts while in use.

So I was considering buying multiple external hard drives with a built-in RJ45 (network) plug and only turn on the drives I need.

Say I have 4 external hard drives with IPs

192.168.10.31
192.168.10.32
192.168.10.33
192.168.10.34

A background process could ping the 4 IPs, and when in library mode the color of the title of a movie (white vs gray) would easily identify which movies were on servers that were reachable. A toggle could also allow for an easy way to switch between Online / Offline / All media, similar to the current Watched / Unwatched / All selection.

If this was possible I would probably store my media in the following way:

server 1: television seasons we have watched
server 2: current television shows
server 3: movies we have watched
server 4: movies we have not watched

I could then get away with only keeping one of the 4 servers online at any given time and do my share to stop global warming