[nul7]

Hi All,
I just wanted to drop a note in this thread to mention that I have submitted a patch which adds a "sorttitle" field to the movie info in the database. If this field exists for a movie, it is sorted based on that. There is one patch to add the basic functionality (requiring a <sorttitle></sorttitle> field to be added to your .nfo file) and another which adds a context menu button to edit the Sort Title in the GUI. You can get the patch from trac (ticket #7008).

Also, I am starting to work on adding the ability to group by sets. Currently, I have added a table to the database containing a list of sets and another table linking movies to sets, including the order of the movie within the set. This allows you to put a section in your .nfo that looks like this:
<set>
<name>Star Wars</name>
<order>1</order>
</set>
for Star Wars Episode I. I can read to and write from the .nfo file for this. Now I have to figure out what to do with this info with respect to the Library. It would be easy enough to add a "Sets" grouping similar to "Genre", "Actor", "Director", "Year", etc., but I think it would be nice to have an entry for each set in the "Title" listing which would take you to a listing of the movies within that set when clicked. That will require a lot more work and a lot more understanding of the way the views are put together.

Anyway, I just wanted folks to know that I am working on this and to see if people have other ideas of how it should work.
Thanks,
Joel

That's fantastic! Would you consider making the sets layout compatible with YAMJ? More info: http://code.google.com/p/moviejukebox/wiki/BoxedSets

It's very similar to what you've proposed, except that it condenses the individual sets into one line (element/optional attribute):

Code:

<set order="1">Some Set Name</set>

Also, a movie can be part of multiple sets:

Code:

<sets>
  <set>Alien Collection</set>
  <set>Predator Collection</set>
  <set order="4">Another Set</set>
</sets>

While I admit, I'm requesting this for selfish reasons (we've already implemented a sets manager in Ember utilizing the YAMJ format), I also think it would benefit those people who use both programs (ie. - they won't have to have two similar, but incompatible, forms of set markers in their nfos and won't have to create the same sets twice). Just a suggestion....

[jmarshall]

This just adds a sorttitle. It gives no indication as to whether it's part of a set or not, which IMO is an independent thing.

[nul7]

This just adds a sorttitle. It gives no indication as to whether it's part of a set or not, which IMO is an independent thing.

Yes, I know.... I was referring to his mention of adding sets support in his post. I apologize for steering the thread off course.

[joelmeans]

That's fantastic! Would you consider making the sets layout compatible with YAMJ? More info: http://code.google.com/p/moviejukebox/wiki/BoxedSets

It's very similar to what you've proposed, except that it condenses the individual sets into one line (element/optional attribute):

Code:

<set order="1">Some Set Name</set>

Also, a movie can be part of multiple sets:

Code:

<sets>
  <set>Alien Collection</set>
  <set>Predator Collection</set>
  <set order="4">Another Set</set>
</sets>

While I admit, I'm requesting this for selfish reasons (we've already implemented a sets manager in Ember utilizing the YAMJ format), I also think it would benefit those people who use both programs (ie. - they won't have to have two similar, but incompatible, forms of set markers in their nfos and won't have to create the same sets twice). Just a suggestion....

Yeah, I wanted to do it that way, but it doesn't look like the XBMC nfo parsing code supports the order="1" part. (At least I couldn't see it. Jonathan, feel free to correct me). The way I have it now, it does support multiple sets. I modeled it after the actor attribute. So you just put as many <set> sections as you want. I think that it is more important to stay consistent with the way XBMC's parsing currently works than to match another program's way of doing it.
Joel

[joelmeans]

This just adds a sorttitle. It gives no indication as to whether it's part of a set or not, which IMO is an independent thing.

Yep, it is independent. I just mentioned that I was working on that next. That is the direction this thread had taken, so I threw it in here.
Joel

[nul7]

Yeah, I wanted to do it that way, but it doesn't look like the XBMC nfo parsing code supports the order="1" part. (At least I couldn't see it. Jonathan, feel free to correct me). The way I have it now, it does support multiple sets. I modeled it after the actor attribute. So you just put as many <set> sections as you want. I think that it is more important to stay consistent with the way XBMC's parsing currently works than to match another program's way of doing it.
Joel

I don't know how to do it, but maybe look at the code for parsing fanart. It contains attributes:

Code:

<fanart url="http://www.someserver.com">

and

Code:

<thumb preview="/somethumb.jpg">/someimage.jpg</thumb>

[joelmeans]

I don't know how to do it, but maybe look at the code for parsing fanart. It contains attributes:

Code:

<fanart url="http://www.someserver.com">

and

Code:

<thumb preview="/somethumb.jpg">/someimage.jpg</thumb>

I didn't look closely enough at that, I guess. I will have to check it out. I am just learning all of this as I go.
Thanks,
Joel

[jmarshall]

element->Attribute("order",&some_int); will do the trick.

[olympia]

but I think it would be nice to have an entry for each set in the "Title" listing which would take you to a listing of the movies within that set when clicked. That will require a lot more work and a lot more understanding of the way the views are put together.

Thank you for this Joel. That sounds amazing... and this is exactly the way I would visioned this feature. Keep up your enthusiasm and the good work on this!

[joelmeans]

Code:

<sets>
  <set>Alien Collection</set>
  <set>Predator Collection</set>
  <set order="4">Another Set</set>
</sets>

Just a quick note that I have decided to go with this arrangement. I think having compatibility with YAMJ will help a lot of people. I have the nfo read/write working (I thought I did before, but I was only reading, not writing, correctly). That was the easy part. Figuring out how to get it to display correctly is a much larger can of worms. Don't expect anything too soon.
Joel

[nul7]

Code:

<sets>
  <set>Alien Collection</set>
  <set>Predator Collection</set>
  <set order="4">Another Set</set>
</sets>

Just a quick note that I have decided to go with this arrangement. I think having compatibility with YAMJ will help a lot of people. I have the nfo read/write working (I thought I did before, but I was only reading, not writing, correctly). That was the easy part. Figuring out how to get it to display correctly is a much larger can of worms. Don't expect anything too soon.
Joel

Thank you! That just made my day!

[da-anda]

hmm - how about tagging? Isn't that quite simmilar to this feature, but would be more general for other media. So you could create a tag "Movie Collections" and add a second tag "Alien Collection". After you filtered for "Movie Collections", the taglist could refresh and show all other tags related to items that are tagged with "Movie Collection".
Nested tags would be the nicest thing - but might be a bit more complicated to implement as you probably would need IDs and a reference DB table.

[jmarshall]

If, when one selects a tag, it just shows another set of tags, how do you ever get to the videos - only when you exhaust all tags? Seems icky.

Instead, if you click a tag, it'll show all videos with that tag.

Sets in this respect are identical to tags - they just have a more defined behaviour, and possibly have ordering information.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[da-anda]

If, when one selects a tag, it just shows another set of tags, how do you ever get to the videos - only when you exhaust all tags? Seems icky.

Of course you need to have the tag list and the results on the same screen. So maybe on the right hand side a slim "filter" section with tags and maybe some other filtering/sorting options and on the main screen section the results - be it videos, tv-shows, music, pictures - whatever has that tag and whatever media is about to be shown (could also be defined in the "filter" section).

Seems that I have a different view of how a mediacenter/-library should work - or maybe I'm just too much influenced by media- and photo-management tools.

[jmarshall]

Yeah, sounds like way too much on screen for a 10" UI that one browses with a remote.