[MrCrispy]

Videos/Library separation has to die. We need a very generic base which can accommodate different views on top of it.

- add multiple sources (from physical drives, http streams, network etc)
- support for tags, like Movies, Tv, Docs. Thus the same content can be part of my movie library, as well as a specialized kids library. Tags can be nested, and are user definable as well as automatically assigned by Xbmc based on rules
- sources (and content within sources) have tags assigned to them
- Metadata scanning is done once. It is linked to content using a mapping scheme, so that the same metadata (e.g. for a movie) can easily be shared, and metadata need not be deleted if content is not present
- All views are simply based on tags

All of this (except for the Views) can be done offline/online and centralized (e.g. Plex media server, but it could be an Xbmc instance). The goal would be to let the user define views (and download standard View types like an addon - e.g. there could be a View which would be Movie box sets, or popular documentaries). When the View is instantiated, any content that is not found would not show up. And the whole system needs to be very granular as well, so an existing Xbmc client simply gets updated as new content gets added to a remote server, without the need to refresh/restart the client.

We don't even need a dedicated server as long as Xbmc can operate in p2p mode. e.g. lets say I have Xbmc running on 3 different pc's. They all have different movies/tv etc on their local drives. The 3 clients can all talk to each other (using a well known Xbmc protocol and discovery mechanism, so the user has to setup nothing) and exchange metadata. Any content which is not local will be linked to the network url. The end result is all 3 Xbmc clients have all the content showing up, whether its on their pc or not. And the whole thing is self-configuring and self-healing. So if one machine shuts down, its content would seamlessly appear as offline.