It should come as no surprise that XBMC has great library functionality. And its skinning ability has allowed third-party developers to display the myriad of information contained within the library with great effect. Library management is fairly easy with one HTPC running XBMC, but it can become more time-consuming as that number increases. XBMC used to have an option to essentially constantly update the library. Even with enabling this functionality in the settings file, I was unable to get it to work (I keep my media on Samba share, so this may have to do with it).
But, you can also schedule updates to occur using cron. This method offers an additional benefit if you are running XBMC on a limited-resource machine, such as an Acer Aspire Revo, in that you can schedule the library update to occur when you are not using the machine. I accomplished this by dumping a script into the /etc/cron.daily/ folder, however, you can make an actual cron tab entry if you prefer to customize when the library update runs, or if you would like it to run more or less than once per day. But, to get this working, you will need to install the xbmc-eventclients-xbmc-send package:
sudo apt-get install xbmc-eventclients-xbmc-send
After installing, the following command will cause XBMC to update the video library:
/usr/bin/xbmc-send -a “UpdateLibrary(video)” >> /dev/null 2>&1
Note, that you can also update the audio library by replacing “video” with “audio.” As noted, this command can either be added to your crontab, or as a script in one of the /etc/cron. directories. Enjoy!