[locotewz]

Having the ability to catalog and include offline content in XMBC would be good but its needs to have a method of filtering it (or indicating what is offline).

One way to do this is that when a folder has a scraper set to it, you can also set an option that the entire structure is "offline"

eg. I might have on my server

/movies/(lots of movies that are actually on the harddisk)
/offline_movies/(lots of fake files as has been previously discussed)

Then you can set the scraper for the /offline_movies folder structure to consider everything under there to be "offline"

Then, when displaying the movie names and other things in library view, a graphic could be overlayed with the thumbnail to indicate the movie is offline. This would allow you to see which movies were available to play now and which ones were on media elsewhere.

From that its easy to take it a step further and expand the .nfo files to have a "catalog#" piece of metadata that could be included for offline media, and if the video is played in XBMC a simple message saying "This media is offline and is located on catalog # xxxx"

You can then go and retrieve the media and copy it to your online folder (if you store things on external hard drives like I do) or insert the DVD rom into the xbox and watch it.

You could also then add a filter to the side bar to show/hide offline content.