Solved Issue Option to Create Multiple Video Libraries

. moved to new thread.

Yep, having multiple libraries/entrypoints/categories or whatever you want to call it, like Media Browser would make me put my first donation in. That is the one lacking big feature I see missing from XBMC. How hard can it be to implement this?

Or to just simply add more sort filters to the playlists like the already Name, size, etc.

>>X<< Wrote:Well for kids the login screen on a remote button seems ideal to me the transition between profiles doing it that way is very nice plus they can have their own skins settings addons and don't mess with how you want your library

i was doing some testing with this,
and was using the toggle profile switch guide
switching to the kids profile worked,
but switching back doesn't work.
it brings me back to the kids profile

i edited the keyboard.xml by adding
in userdata\keymaps
then i made a new keyboard.xml with
and put that in userdata\profiles\Kids\keymaps

Got XBMC up since a couple of weeks on my new apple TV 2 now, but the option to make more libraries would be so totally the only thing i'm missing...

Just putting in my vote here

I had a look in to the databases and docu there.

the bad news is: there are 4 differend, hard coded categories, how video content is managed:

movies
tvshows
episodes (tvshows)
musicvideos

The good news is - it does not matter, because almost all requests can be considered as a subset of one of these above.

So how can a generic category be split in the remaining generic content and a derived custom subset.

Easy answer:

we need an additional flag for selection.

There is already a similar solution in place to remember the preferred view per datasource using a separate db called video modes database and containing one table, that stores the video mode per file source path.

So what is necessary to achieve hiding of custom categories and show them alone in a separate category:

prerequisite: store the custom conten on a own source location
create a new table with 2 columns (customID default 0, path)
choose scraper for this location and save the custom category id along with the path in the reference table
the data goes unfiltered to the right structures like any other content
store the id flag in the new table along with the datasource path

all tables / schema in xbmc remain untouched
4 views will be extended by parameter customID default 0 and will join the new table.

each classic select call to the views will return all content with default entry 0, even if no parameter is provided, the custom conten will remain hidden.

The skin needs some adjustments to deliver custom buttons for the new category and call python / the query to fill the container for browsing with the additional custom parameter.

For conveniance one can write a config window - lets say for 5 custom categories (names) under system / settings / skin and can add them to the menu to hide / show the custom category 1..5 similar like the option to show / hide movies, tv-shows, videos.
Also the scraper choice menu can have a selection for default, category 1..5 when configuring the source.

After this, xbmc can have 5 custom scrapeable categories along with each standard tv-shows / movies / music videos category.

see this post:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=989542&postcount=9

Something like the inclusion of those 'tags' would be much more flexible than multiple libraries that some seem to think are a good solution.

XBMC is an amazing Media Library tool, and i agree that by far its biggest shortfall is not supporting multiple video libraries. THis would be a huge asset to the users. In the mean time, i will continue using profiles as my "workaround" because i don't loose functionality like i do with smart playlists.

I would also make my first donation if we could have either multiple libraries or custom tags. This is the one fatal flaw in XBMC for me, and the reason why I still largely use an Excel file for managing my movie collection.

I am dealing with the same frustration. I have hundreds of documentary films and kids films that I don't want mucking up my movies and the same with documentary and kids tv shows hosing up my tv shows library. All of the workarounds break the nice features like the filtering by genre and or the view types.

You can't have custom tags (well, not without throwing it into some other tag) but the nightlies now make the library completely configurable as in you can throw smartplaylists (or just folders) all over the show. There's various bits of information on this - google will guide (the forum search itself sucks).