You could always try to persuade him to use Media Companion to generate Posters, Fanart and nfo files for all the Movies on the Server (saves them in the same folder as the Movie Files) and then install and use the Movies Plugin to watch them on NPVR (Can be used in XBMC as well) Impresses the Neighbors when they come round
It's not an overly complicated system - it's more - overly simple operatives
Thanks, that sounds like the way to go. However he uses XBMC to watch the movies on his server and I think XBMC stores metadata locally. Adding folders and metadata to the server would probably screw with this.