heads up: Video library reorganisation via XML

Ugrade to a build that has them

@pecinko:

Assuming your video files can be differentiated either by smartplaylists or (if not in the library) by different paths, then sure.

I've been thinking about this some more and although I might be digging my own hole considering skin re-coding that would need to take place, I wonder what do you think about taking this step further. Considering this major update to XBMC organization and work involved both in XBMC and skin code maybe we should make it more agnostic and get advanced users more involved in altering XBMC look and feel. I propose:

1) Index.xml (/userdata/database/index.xml) containing list of links for home page main navigation. This would be user customizable set of links for home page. Each item in this list would need to have an ID. Basically, it is what we have now - we have only moved <content>...</content> of main navigation list to index.xml

2) Instead of {video} and {video_flat} we place folders named after IDs from index.xml containing filters for that item. Given that "Movies" in index.xml have ID="1", our folder should be named "1". We put our filters there if we want them or just don't make folder "1" if we want to go directly to "Movies".

Ad 1: we reserve ID=9000 for main navigation on home page so that list of user created links in index.xml can be passed to it
Ad 2: we reserve ID=9001-9050 for main navigation sublist (filters) so we can pass defined filters (9001 sublist = filters item id=1 in container 9000)

This way maybe we don't need flatten/unflatten, we can use it for music and other XBMC sections as well as for videos and we can have customizable home screen as well.

Just as an example, I prefer grouping all my add ons under "Addons" menu and I have "home" menu on home screen, containing pictures and home videos.

For organizing links and filters, we could have a new screen similar to file browser. Not sure about drag and drop, as I really think mouse does not be log to XBMC, but we can have "move up" and "move down" as in favorites. BTW, people are already using favorites to assign custom links on home page, both main and filters so what I'm proposing above is not really new thing rather suggestion for doing it in official and more user friendly manner. Only thing you can not do through favorites ATM is assigning thumbs and fanart to your preferred links.

flatten/unflatten is only there now because it was more important to get this in and have people start using it and seeing the possibilities.

It'll be gone once things are more easily customised, as 99.9% of the time users have it one way or the other. They don't want or need to be able to switch between 'em all the time.

So yes, that will be gone. How I see the homescreen working is that lists will be auto-filled, but the skinner must still have a small amount of control, thus the idea to simply fill listings using library://video/ style URIs. There's no reason why the scheme can't be extended to cover other areas of XBMC.

So, in theory, you could have your entire movie collection listed on the home screen?

It's more like you skin main nav and submenus but the <content> part is supplied by user. When you switch skins your links remains so there's no need to use favourites on per skin basis.

@Hitcher, assuming we allow any listing inside a "static" list, then yes. Obviously there's LOTS of potential gotchas to take care of first (eg what happens when you click an item for a start!)

What about Offline Movies? This was something that's been overlooked in smart playlists. Would be nice to be able to differentiate between online and offline movies without having to rely on all offline movie stubs being in the same path.

Please keep separate discussion, well, separate.

Do we want any of this on the wiki yet, or is it in flux or anything like that?