**The Cliff-Notes version**
I propose your media manager do for digital video what ID3 tags did for digital audio: Do away with all the messiness and stick everything in an MKV.


**The boring back story**
First of all, I'd like to wish you the best of luck with this project. I haven't read through all 24 pages of discussion on xbmc.org, but from what I've seen it looks like you have some good ideas. Perhaps you could lay out a basic overview of the project somewhere on this site. Without combing through the original topic, I'm not exactly sure what the scope of this project entails.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about media management lately. I have ~5TB worth of media on a WHS box that I've collected over the years in a variety of formats. I've kept it as organized as possible, adhering to standard naming conventions and folder structures. I've used XBMC on a modded Xbox since it was XBMP, but that just isn't cutting the mustard any more. I'm in the process of upgrading to a proper HTPC with XBMC / Aeon. While playing with all the new library and scraping features and testing things out under both Windows and Linux, I had a few realizations.

The first is that there is no standard for video metadata. XBMC uses JPGs for artwork and XML with a .nfo extension for text info, but these won't necessarily work on WMC or other media players. In fact, the locations and naming conventions of these metadata files are not even standard across different versions of XBMC.

The second is that generating all these extra files is so sloppy. My media collection is already less clean than I'd like. Thousands of files in varying formats with varying extensions. Some movies are in multiple parts (CD1, CD2, etc). Some have external subtitle files. Add to that the fact that some scrapers dump the JPG and NFO files they generate into the media directory itself, and it gets to be a real mess. XBMC does a great job of hiding all this, but it doesn't have to be this way in the first place.


**The point**
MKV is a very versatile container. It can hold any number of audio and video tracks, as well as any other kind of data as attachments. I propose your media manager set a new standard and consolidate all the parts that might make up a title (multiple parts, subtitles, artwork, metadata) into one MKV file, regardless of the original format. The MKV container is smart enough to append one AV track onto the end of another, so absolutely no transcoding is required. Demuxing and remuxing is a very quick process.

Consolidating all the files into one container makes them infinitely more manageable and portable. You can move the single MKV from one computer to another and all the pieces and metadata will move with it. The more I've been thinking about this, the more surprised I am that nobody has done it yet.

In order for something like this to catch on, you'd have to work in reading metadata from the MKVs into XBMC and WMC. I admit that I have no idea how difficult this would be. I believe the MKV format is both open and well documented, so hopefully it would not be hard. Hopefully developers of other software and standalone devices would adopt it as well.