[AbRASiON]

Just to clarify, I have a giant collection of movies, furthermore I'm so hard to please with my pickyness!

I am exploring the UI and I really wish I could do the following (for example)
Choose a range of years in my library, say 1980 to 2000
Stipulate "Scifi Flag"
Sort by rating

I can do 2 of these things but I can't seem to filter by year.
Infact it would be great if I could just filter by all kinds of things, let's say my library has only 50 directors in the entire library.

I wish I could select 15 of those directors with some kind of 'tick' or tag button.
Then choose range of years.
Then stipulate Scifi
and finally sort by rating.

Does all this make sense? I realise it's a bit pedantic but there's so much fantastic data stored locally and when libraries start to get in the 300->1000 movie range, it can really help someone find exactly the film they want to watch.
Any thoughts (Don't tell me, there's a plugin which does this, or XBMC already can and I'm doing it wrong)
Note: New to XBMC, haven't used it since the Xbox 1.

Thanks for your time guys and girls.

[prae5]

You can do this now using smart playlists.

Create a smart playlist - type movies
Set Genre is Science Fiction
Year Greater than 1980
Year Less than 2000
Items must match all rules
Order by Rating

Save it and your done.

Its not quite nice as being able to tick things like you want, but its certainly possible to filter this way. That being said, what your asking for could be done as an add-on.

[AbRASiON]

Thanks for the suggestion, it did help somewhat - I think my suggestions could be implimented into a UI change.
The program is immensly powerful, feels like it's not taking full advantage of that database.

[AbRASiON]

Anyone else have thoughts on this/

[jmarshall]

The problem is setting up a UI that is usable, quick and intuitive when your only input device is a 6 or 7 button remote, but also doesn't suffer if you have a keyboard or touch input.

[AbRASiON]

Absoloutely agreed but that's where having thousands of us nerd users give feedback can help.

I think the logical thing to do at this point is to either re-design the smart playlist system or significantly buff the current filter system. The smart playlist system is incredibly powerful from what I'm seeing but (no offense intended) bloody cumbersome if you just want to casually pick a movie out. I definitely feel modifying the filter system is the way to go, the current filter system seems acceptable for all data types (Movies / TV etc) but not ideal for fine tuning specific individual ones.

My thoughts are some kind of radio button list in the "movie filter mode" for example with multiple things you can tick to filter on (year, actor, genre and so on)

So for the year view for example you click on the radio button which makes the year button now clickable / active
Once you click the year button, this dialog box could bring up perhaps 2 simple sliders, one above and one below.
You slide the top one to the far left and you slide the bottom one to the far right and you've selected ALL of your movies in the year range (if you don't filter it, obviously it should choose all movies anyhow)
|X1956 | 1960 | 1970 | 1980 | 1990 | 2000 | 2010 | 2012 |
| 1956 | 1960 | 1970 | 1980 | 1990 | 2000 | 2010 | 2012X|
Obviously somewhere it could also tell you in plain text a summary of what you chose "all movies from 1956 to 2012" on this page.
Click ok, you're back to the filter view, year radio button is now obviously on.


Next the genre box you tick this, again - enabling the previously greyed out genre button.
Once you click in to this you have your genres available similar to the system settings menu, a radio button per entry and simply tick on or off the genre(s) you'd like to select. Then ok.

Actor could be similar to the genre box, perhaps you could either slowly cycle through them left to right or have a rolodex style alphabet on the left / top which is also cycleable?
https://www.google.com/search?q=rolodex&...80&bih=490

From what I just described, I could very, very easily isolate all my old action movies from 1970 to 1990 starring Sylvester Stallone in probably less than 20 seconds.


Now I do see an issue in this in that you would now have to maintain different filters per 'view' of the package, the Movie filter, the TV filter and the Music filter, however I think it could really help how people work with the program itself.

Any comments? (I wish I could code)

[jmarshall]

Draw pictures (they don't need to be flash) - best way to get across UI ideas

While the slider thing works for years (not a bad idea - typically you want a range, after all, though my guess is just picking decade(s) might do the trick) it doesn't work for much other stuff (ratings you'd probably only want > foo)

Genres isn't too bad with a tick-list. Actors is a nightmare no matter what - IMO search is the only thing that makes sense there. Same with directors - you don't need a big collection for that to be unwieldy.

My guess is setting up a filter that just AND's the various fields together (OR within a field, AND between fields) is all that most users require - the trick is to make it fast enough to use.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[AbRASiON]

I can't believe people are even LISTENING to my UI suggestions, this is great.
Here check out the mockup pictures - obviously very rough, only put 10 minutes thought into them.
http://imgur.com/a/gDAPY <- click this, no really UI suggestions here.
Bear in mind those are the indivudual "sub menus" based off the primary new filter I'm proposing (which I haven't drawn up yet)

---

(ratings you'd probably only want > foo)

Personal opinion:
Once the filter has filtered out - you don't need a rating option - you just sort the final results by rating if you like ? :/

[AbRASiON]

I really dislike having to continue to use smart playlists to refine my library of movies. I have 1100 to go through and sometimes it can be difficult.
Not only do I recommend my above changes to be considered, what about a classic "wizard" system to find a movie?

Page 1 asks rating range (IMDB)
Page 2 asks genre (tickable multiple possible)
Page 3 asks year range
etc
etc
Each subsequent page shows you "1001 match this filter" -> "600 match this filter" -> "212 match this filter"
No?
Anyone?

P.S there's a bug in the filter regarding movie duration, posting about this in the bug report area when I find it.

[Montellese]

My GSoC project for this summer has the goal to provide advanced filtering options right in the media views without having to manually create smartplaylists. For a more detailed description check out http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=127885 and feel free to leave a comment/suggestions. I'm currently doing some work that is required to make something like this possible at all (better/unified sorting and set handling etc) so I haven't jumped into the real filtering stuff yet.

Concerning the movie duration bug, it is known. The problem is that movie durations are scraped and stored as strings e.g. "90 minutes" or "1 h 30 min" (depending on the scraper source) so it's not useful/usable for sorting at all.

[AbRASiON]

I will take a look at this, I've been so busy.
I really like XBMC - would love to see it even better. So much metadata not fully used!

[AbRASiON]

Does anyone else have any intention on working on the UI for XBMC? Not meaning to complain, just curious if it's only a small handful of people who can think of or would like some changes? Anyone else have any thoughts.

Here's my genre selection window idea


Here's my actor selector concept


and my year slider

[AbRASiON]

Does anyone else have any input on this thread? If I could code I'd gladly help out man I wish I could code.

[AbRASiON]

Where can I (best) provide feedback on the new filtering UI implimented in the latest nightlies?

[Montellese]

In here or in a new thread if it's about bugs.