[drose25]

Can someone briefly explain the differences/advantages/disadvantages to custom video nodes and smart playlists? From what I can tell on the wiki, custom nodes might be the simple solution to what I want to do, but I don't want to update to a nightly build to try them out only to have things go pear-shaped. XBMC goes down in my house and I've got people with hot pokers at me until it's up again... Ironic, given the resistance to bringing it in in the first place.

Basically, I have all of my media sources located in subdirectories based on general content. For example, under the Media dir I might have Documentaries, Cartoons, and Movies subdirs. I just want to enable the user to view a particular category of media, so I would add a node or playlist for Documentaries, etc. and then use my skin's custom options to integrate it. It seems a custom node would duplicate the existing library functionality the closest, but are there advantages to using playlists instead? Or disadvantages to using custom video nodes?

Thanks for any tips. I found a nice How-To on doing something similar, but it required users to switch between profiles for each category. I'm hoping to simplify the process for the user.

[PatK]

Considering the caution you noted "I've got people with hot pokers" I would shy away from the nighties. I too am interested in this node library addition, but I can wait until most of the flags are dealt with.

You didn't mention the skin you're using... some are more flexible in this area than others.

The placement of sub directories or folders off the main home page Movie/Video would seem to give you most options.. In filemode you get to see the subs as a section. Throwing in different profiles opens up selective content.

Smart playlists offers a bit more flexibility, setting up not only folders but keywords and multiple rules. So a rule for Disney combined with Animation = only Disney Animations sourced.

There's really no reason you couldn't have both smart playlists/nodes and folders, reading over the wiki on custom nodes, it looks like the standard nodes such as Title, Director, Year, Studios, Countries, Genres that were hard coded are now customizable same as a smart playlist. So most of your smart playlists you make now can be just converted to nodes when you upgrade and add the "doesnotcontain" filter at that point to take them out of your library.

[jmarshall]

They just use smartplaylists, so a poor-mans solution in Eden is to just setup a bunch of smartplaylists then link 'em from home or similar.

Given you have everything well organised in file mode though, I'd just scan each of those independently (if it makes sense to do so) then hookup links to the appropriate file folder on home instead. The metadata will still be shown in files node.