Recording actual viewing habits

I love XBMC. I have very, very VERY few issues with it, but one: the ability to put up a repository, point workstations to it, and then LEARN how often something gets played.

We can't go by "LastPlayed"; each machine has it's own stats.

I can think of all kinds of "find" scripts that can tell me when a given file has been accessed or written...but it's rather clumsy.

It would have to be a separate process, not part of XBMC, but a script to be run periodically, right? Would FAM (File Access and Modification) notification be useful here?

Depends on what you want the data for. Do you care that a certain file has been played, or that a certain TV show has been played?

A service addon could do this easily. It waits for playback to begin, then checks to see what's playing and records the data in a database. Seems like a fairly simple addon, but what would it be used for?

I use the trakt.tv addon that tracks my tv shows and movies that are watched and shows how many times they were played. You can also see the progress of the tv shows that you are watching.