Kodi Community Forum
Video library redesign idea - How can we improve Smart Playlists, aka Filtered Lists? - Printable Version

+- Kodi Community Forum (https://forum.kodi.tv)
+-- Forum: Discussions (https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=222)
+--- Forum: Feature Requests (https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=9)
+--- Thread: Video library redesign idea - How can we improve Smart Playlists, aka Filtered Lists? (/showthread.php?tid=51605)

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16


- olympia - 2009-05-25

I am browsing 95% by title at the moment.
Never used Year/ Actor/ Director/ Studio nodes for browsing purposes.

However I am getting to use browse by genre more and more.
Especially because I made custom genres as DVD, Blu-Ray, HDDVD, DVDRip, etc. to be able to browse by source type. I know it's a hack, but this is the way I can get the max. out of Genre node at the moment and it works great.

Certainly, if there would be a more "offical" way to handle and browse my source/ resoultion type, then this hack had not needed any more, but you asked how we are using the current views at the moment. Smile


- pletopia - 2009-05-25

olympia Wrote:I am browsing 95% by title at the moment.
Never used Year/ Actor/ Director/ Studio nodes for browsing purposes.

However I am getting to use browse by genre more and more.
Especially because I made custom genres as DVD, Blu-Ray, HDDVD, DVDRip, etc. to be able to browse by source type. I know it's a hack, but this is the way I can get the max. out of Genre node at the moment and it works great.

Certainly, if there would be a more "offical" way to handle and browse my source/ resoultion type, then this hack had not needed any more, but you asked how we are using the current views at the moment. Smile

i like that idea of browsing by source/res type .. maybe this can offically be implemented as a node once the media scanner gets pulled into the main trunk svn


- YogiBaboo - 2009-05-25

I use mostly genres already scraped and custom genres through edited nfo's.

Title node is a major pain to scroll, the same goes for Year and since I do not know when some movies were released then most of the time I'm guessing.

Since you planning to redesign library, I would like to add some ideas.

Most of the time people would like to watch specific movie in their libraries instead of browsing through the long lists. therefore library should help locate the movie within seconds. In most cases we know the title of the movie, but finding it is another story. Therefore there should be a starting point in library, all movies, which could be narrowed down with specific filters:

- genres
- alphabetical
- actor
- director
- year
- studio

Custom groups are great idea. Furthermore, I have couple hundreds of non-english movies, which I would like to keep separate, right now this can be only accomplished by creating another profile.


- pletopia - 2009-05-25

its alot easier to browse title node now that you can "shift-<letter>" to quickjump to a specific letter Smile


- MaxNL - 2009-05-25

Library of about 800 movies

Actual:
Browse by Title (Sort Order by Name and By Date), Genre, Year, Recently Added
Never used the others

I'd Like:
Browse by Title, Genre, Year, Resolution, Aspect Ratio, Audio, Rating, MPAA, Language, Collection Name
Filter by Watched / Unwatched, With or Without Subtitles, Actor, Director, and the same fields of the previous list
Sort by Title, Collection / Year, Collection / Sort Title, Year

Hope this is more like the kind of feedback you were expecting.

Regards
Max


- pletopia - 2009-05-25

while we're on the subject of browsing and playing .. i guess i would have another suggestion
it might not fit exactly in this thread but i'll throw it out there anyway

basically i think it would be kewl if:
i enter tv library .. highlight a show .. hit 'C' .. and one of the choices in the menu would be "Play Random Episode"

this is something i've been dying to see in xbmc for a bit now .. it would be great for all those old shows i've seen that i don't want to re-watch in series order but would love to watch a random (like on tv) episode (you know, simpsons, futurama, chappelle's show, etc)


- scourge411 - 2009-05-26

jmarshall Wrote:If you do:

1. Why do you use them (i.e. what is your end goal in using those nodes)?

2. Could this be done better in an alternate way (eg by enabling a "filter" on one or more genres)?

Actually, I just found myself using the Studio node last night; I wanted a list of all the Pixar movies and shorts in my library. So while it's not used all that often, it definitely is occasionally quite useful.

In this particular case, I don't think that there's any 'better' way to do it; typing in a search would be cumbersome, especially if your XBMC doesn't have a keyboard...


- CrashX - 2009-05-26

I use the following on my small video collection ..

Movies:
- Title
- Year

TV Show:
- Title

But maybe when I have 1000+ films it might be usefull to have Actors and Director info ...

I would love to see:
- Ratings
- HD Content


- rcoops - 2009-05-26

Personally I do not do to much with the current options in the video library I just can't be bothered to remember when a movie was shot who directed it or who stared in it. But...
If as mentioned before a new way of accessing the video library would exist for example list all movies by the same director or with this actor. From the info screen this would be a wonderful way to get people like me to actually enjoy all the hard work put into the video library.

As for what I would like to see changed because in the end that is what this thread is about and skins should be able to cover the idea listed above with some handy work on the side of the person creating the skin (at least that is what I believe from what I have seen so far)

I would love to see video resolutions included as some times one just wants to show off the fullHD quality stuff.
I also think a good thing would be to have movie length in there as it happens quite a few times that you have say an hour and a half or so thus you will have to drop obvious things like the LOTR extended editions but the few hundred others that you are not sure about you don't want to have to all check.

A way to search on arbitrary fields like IMDB rating, or ESRB, would come in handy or better yet compound options where I could say all movies after year X rated over 7.8 on IMDB and falling in the PG13 category.

The next thing that I think would help a lot is to be able to exclude certain things like all movies from 1996 till now not directed by him.

The last thing that I think would help a lot is besides the possibility to construct custom searches to be able to store say 5 or 10 of them. That would make for a lot easier searching certainly when there is a way to construct relatively complex searches.
Of course people with only a few movies will not care to much for such functionality bu I think that anyone that is getting close to or has passed the 500 full length movies will not be able to imagine life without this functionality.


- kizer - 2009-05-26

Movies
I use title primarly.
Sometimes most recent or genre.

TV
Primarly Title
Sometimes most recent


- jmarshall - 2009-05-27

Thanks for all your contributions - I've pretty much nailed down what we require as far as the backend goes with respect to grouping and so on.

The user interface is now my current focus.

Many of you don't seem aware that most of the stuff you're asking for can already be done by the smartplaylist system.

Clearly, it's non-optimal as far as the interface of it goes, though I suspect the biggest problem is the fact that you have to go into playlists in order to select or generate one.

I'd encourage everyone to go and give them a go, and see what you like and what you don't like about the process required to set them up and so on.

My current thoughts is that they'll be broken down into two:

1. A simplified process that can be used for "on the fly" filters that can apply to any 'title' based listing (eg "show watched only", or "show action or thriller films only"), to replace the current "watched/unwatched" toggle.
2. A general "Filtered listing" node that essentially just places a predefined smartplaylist at some point in the video library heirarchy. Similar to how "Recently added movies" is placed for instance.

Cheers,
Jonathan


- J_K_M_A_N - 2009-05-27

I love the playlists. The one thing I had some trouble with was grouping and's and or's. Example, I wanted a listing of all the currently running TV shows that the wife and I watch and then unwatched episodes of said shows. As far as I could tell, the only way to do that was to create a playlist of current TV shows (House OR Grey's Anatomy OR The Mentalist) and then use that playlist in another playlist that added AND playcount less than 1 clause. So it was an 'or' list with an 'and' list. I did't see any other way to make that work. Is there any way to hide that 'or' list? I only need it for the other playlist. Or is there any other way around that?

Otherwise, if I could make that playlist show up in a different area, it would be PERFECT. Then I think people could do most of those other things with a playlist right now. (Also, it would be great if you could create a playlist through the web interface so you could use a keyboard. I haven't looked if it is already possible. If it is, sorry.)

J_K_M_A_N


- jmarshall - 2009-05-27

This is a problem, I agree, but it's non-trivial to display this sort of thing in the user interface, given that one has to allow nested ands within ors or ors within ands and so on. For example,

{rule1} OR {rule2} OR {rule3} AND {rule4}

might be interpreted by some as "at least one of rule 1, 2, or 3 is holds, and rule 4 also must hold" whereas in reality it's "at least one of rule 1, rule 2, or the combination of rule 3 and rule4 must hold".

That's why I chose to go the easy way out: You only get ors or ands in a single filter, but you can combine filters.

Now, one way to improve on this is allowing more scope in a single rule. For instance, we could combat your situation quite well, as the or's are all on the one field, so the 3 rules you have could be combined into a single rule via some sort of multiple select on the genres. Then you combine that rule (via AND) with your watched rule and you're done.

You can't handle all cases in this way though - ideas most welcome Smile

Cheers,
Jonathan


- AaronD - 2009-05-27

jmarshall Wrote:Thanks Aaron. I presume you are meaning filtering by IMDb rating, rather than browsing by it?

Cheers,
Jonathan

Yes, that's true.


- AaronD - 2009-05-27

jmarshall Wrote:Now, one way to improve on this is allowing more scope in a single rule.

...

You can't handle all cases in this way though - ideas most welcome Smile

What about the idea of having smartplaylists that aren't displayed. So you can build up arbitrarily complex rules, and flag the rule as "not displayed" because its only ever used in another rule.