@
hernandito
So I was intreeged and ive spent the past few hours researching some things to do with controlling XBMC and its database. Heres what ive found, although don't hold me to it, lol:
From what ive read it seems sickbeard handles artwork and show information in just the same way as other media managers. When a show is added the post processing feature will grab the artwork and dump it in your show folder and create a .NFO file for XBMC to look at to retrive its information and artwork related to the show. It then seems to call upon the JSON-RPC API within XBMC allowing it then to initiate a update of your library saving any issues with the 3rd party app breaking your database.
Manual modification of XBMC's library I believe is only possible using mySQL. It seems though that may not be the best solution as different versions of XBMC will store different data in different ways, which could lead to neverending incompatability problems. Its best to leave the modifications to the library upto XBMC itself to be on the safe side.
So whats PixelGrafters plan you ask?
It will be similiar to the way SickBeard works, let me explain........ The JSON-RPC API, allows only control of functions within XBMC and not manual modification of its library. This leads me to believe that the best solution for the final version of PixelGrafters would be to initiate the necesary API calls to fire XBMC into updating its library itself after you have changed the artwork locally or added a new tv show from within the PixelGrafters app. This would save manually modifying the database which could cause issues. A feature like this would most likley get implimented as a "Update Show Artwork/Info in XBMC" button in the interface for you to press after completing your changes.
Note: XBMC has ways of caching images and can be known for taking days to properlly reflect artwork changes made from 3rd party apps. (Annoying i know) The usual way of forcing a show to refresh its image cache is to select a show and press 'I', and select 'Refresh', if that doesnt work, XBMC is meant to update the image cache every 24 hours anyway. So far I havent come across a way of doing cache refreshes remotley.
I hope this explains a little better how 3rd party apps get their changes into XBMC, let me know if ive confused you, I do tend to babble.
EoD