Media stubs

Beginning with the nightly builds from March 29, 2011 (commit 86969939), XBMC now has support for offline media stub files. These are files that represent a media outside of the online digital infrastructure and allow XBMC's library to catalogue your "offline" media collection, as well as ask for the media when selected for playback. By default these files have a .disc extension (modifiable via advancedsettings.xml). In cooperation with Confluence Skin's (and possibly others) feature to search for words like DVD, Bluray, and HDDVD in the filename it is possible to create a disc stub file that will show correct media flags in the skin. For example, if you have Finding Nemo on DVD, you could create an empty file called: "Finding Nemo (2003).dvd.disc" and add it to your library. In the XBMC libray this file will show up with the DVD media flag in the Confluence Skin and when selected you will be prompted to insert the Finding Nemo DVD.

To mark a disc stub as BluRay add the words "bluray" or "bdrip" to the file name (as explained above). For HDDVD add "hddvd". For DVD add "dvd". For TV add "pdtv", "hdtv", or "dsr". For VHS add "vhs".

Beginning with the nightly builds from April 13, 2011 (commit 6fc3542), XBMC now has support for adding a custom message to be displayed when attempting to play a Disc Stub file. This is accomplished by treating the disc stub file as an xml file with the following layout:

<discstub>
  <message>Message to be displayed</message>
</discstub>

The message will be displayed on the second line of the dialog box that asks you to insert a disc when selecting a disc stub file for playback. This added feature allows users who use a numbered library for their disc media to also take advantage of this new Disc Stub file support in XBMC.

For more technical information on this new feature see here, here, and here.