[Ned Scott]

I'll be trying this out soon as I want to start using XBMC from multiple places. One question - after this setup, where all the data, thumbnails, content etc live on the server, do the numerous addons and tools still work properly? e.g. something like Artwork downloader.

And won't you still need to run XBMC on a client pc regularly so that it can scan and update the library with new content on the server.

In just using MySQL itself, only the databases for music and videos are shared. The video library will contain summaries, watch status, location of the library on your network, bookmarks, resume progress, and some other metadata stuff.

When XBMC is using a MySQL db it pretty much treats it the same way as if it were a normal local db. If you update the library on an XBMC device that is connected to MySQL, it updates like normal, but that update gets reflected to anyone accessing the db. You can edit, remove, use various tools, just as you would for a normal local SQL db.

Because XBMC doesn't re-download images for each XBMC device, there are a few options for making sure you have images/covers/thumbnails on all clients outlined on the wiki guide. These won't be needed for nightly builds (wiki) and the future XBMC v12 release (which does re-download the images fro each XBMC device), but for the time being you can choose from manually copying the thumbnails folder, pathsubs, or symbolic links.

Step 6 of the wiki guide, "Sync other parts of XBMC", goes into some other things that can be shared.