[fr1day]

Yesterday I finally took the plunge and upgraded to Eden. It went pretty well for the most part, the forum here helped a lot with some sound issues I was having.

However after messing around with it for a few hours I noticed that Whenever I went into the 'Files' view and unticked 'Hide All' in TV shows it also changed this view in my Library so the next time I went into Library mode I was presented with all shows watched and unwatched. The exact same thing happened for Movies, and when I change the view to hide watched within my Library the files view also only showed unwatched content.

The different views is something I used a lot in Dharma, I have two small kids who like to watch the same stuff over and over again, my wife is comfortable with going into the Files view (previously just Videos) and picking out what they want to watch and in the evenings we'll use the library to choose what we want to watch without having to scroll through pages of already watched content. I know it might sound like a small thing having to change views for different occasions, but when you're likely to have to do it at least twice every day I can see it getting tedious especially knowing that pre Eden all I had to do was choose a different context to see exactly what I wanted without any messing.

I've looked in every menu I can find using both the Confluence and Transparency! skins with no luck, I've also tried looking at some files in the Userdata folder but most of it doesn't mean a lot to me. A search of the forum here also provided no useful results, but that could be down to the fact that words like Video, Files, Watched, Unwatched etc are so common. I'm running XBMCBuntu as my OS, have 2 HTPCs in the house, and use a central Mysql database to keep the libraries in sync.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have 2 more days of messing around before my wife returns with the kids and depending on her reaction this could prove a reason to downgrade again.

[Chris!]

Possibly the source of your issue: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Upg..._videos.3F
No idea how to solve it though. Sorry.

[Ned Scott]

Check out Profiles (wiki). Basically like a user log-in screen where everyone can have the same library, but their own watched statuses (or even their own library set-up, if you choose).

[fr1day]

Thanks for the replies.

The change to the way files are treated certainly explains the behaviour, I only wish I could find a way around it. I have no problem with different views instead of modes but ideally there should be a way to customise them depending on where where you're coming from; otherwise it seems like the files view is a bit redundant if all it does is show you the exact same thing as the library view.

When the kids get a bit older I can see how profiles will be ideal, but for now I don't see my wife going for the idea of having to login to different profiles all the time depending on who wants to watch something

Anyone else have any ideas of how to get around this?

[Ned Scott]

Think of the library view as "show me everything in the library" while file view is "show me everything as I organized it". That's basically the idea there.

There's pretty much no way of disabling this. Perhaps some creative skin hacking could do something like that, where it did a sort of "custom hide", but you would probably find it easier to convince your wife to give profiles a chance than to get a skinner to make the hack.

[fr1day]

Hmm, I may have to look into remapping a key on the remote to toggle the hiding and unhiding of watched content or something so. I can almost hear the "Why did you change it it was working fine as it was" comments in my head already, whether it's enough to force a downgrade only time will tell, I'm just glad I backed everything up.

[MacGyver]

Under Dharma I used "Hide Watched" and "TV Shows" to show me whats been added and not yet watched, and used "Files" to see what I had, and to be able to re-watch something that had been watched before. The separation between "Files" and "Library" made this easy and possible. This is what I use XBMC for 90% of the time.

I tried a few months ago to find away around this short-coming in Eden, but there is nothing we can do about it, short of what I did, which is to accept the idea that I can never upgrade to Eden. All I really gave up was some stability and the ability to check the weather, well that and the lack of updates.

Basically unless you want to always play with the watched/unwatched setting, XBMC won't do what it used to do prior to the whole "merged files and library" thing. If watched/unwatched was a skin feature rather than a internal function, you could do something about it, but until you can "toggle" that function with something like <showunwatched>Container.Content(Files)</showunwatched>, you will have to keep toggling the watched/unwatched button. I personally think that "Files"mode should be internally coded to always show "Unwatched", Files mode should be raw, ugly, and represent reality, almost like the File Manager, but only showing media..

It sucks, because it's such a tiny thing, but it's a tiny thing that makes my XBMC experience so much better.

[MacGyver]

Here is a link to the thread about it from January.
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=120709

I pretty much gave up, Dharma is great, so I don't worry too much about it. In fact, every update to XBMC has been great, it just doesn't work for what I want to do anymore (Eden that is, I'll always use XBMC in some form). Anyway, I don't see anyone else being bothered by it, so it's likely not an issue to most users.