[kuratkull]

People are free to rip their purchased media. He even says that he buys blurays/dvds in the article. One can assume anything, but a completely legal setup can look exactly like that. Especially as most of those are relatively old movies - looking like a list of purchased blurays/dvds to me.

[defrost]

It's entirely possible to populate a media tree of movies and shows with stub zero length files, just the formally named movie or tv episode names, and have Kodi and other other media managers download all the meta data (posters, descriptions, cast, etc) to sideload in the media tree or maintain in their own internal databases.

It's useful for testing and debugging media software in addition to being a great way to browse through all the films with ActorX or all the movies in a genre or a year.

You get the same visuals flipping through Kodi with and only lack something happening when you press play (unless you populate with named files that all hardlink to that Rick Astley music video).