Doing work in the background?

I scan a site for videos and I need to do multiple requests for each video to get the necessary information in order to be able to play it and display information.

To reduce the loading time, I would like to be able to gather information about the movies, such as "Plot", in the background, after the virtual directory structure has been established.

However, I am not sure how XBMC's plugin architecture works. I presume it loads the items directly into non-python memory, thereby destroying the relationship between my actual node and the pyton ListItem object.

Is it possible to add information to a node after it has been "submitted" to XBMC from the plugin? (i.e. after endofdirectory())

nope.

hmm too bad. Thanks for the information.

Is there any place with more information about the plugin architecture in general? I find that the HOW-TOs are more of a "we want to do that, here's the code" and not really much of an explanation of how the things work together.

For instance, I have been struggling to get my covers downloaded, until I noticed that it gets cached depending on the path or url (or at least so I believe) so I have been trying for hours to get my thumbnails working...