[steve1977]

I am currently using neither movie playlists nor moviesets, but am planning to start doing so. I am curious what is exactly the difference between the two and whether in some way, it is just a different technical implementation of the same thing?

I am trying to group movies that have some commonality (e.g., all Disney animated features films). In a way, I could either define them as a movieset or I could create a playlist.

Thanks in advance for any ideas you may have!

[saitoh183]

Movieset are for defined collections mostly. If you scrape movies using the internal scraper of xbmc, the <set> tag of the nfo file will be filled with the collection name..like Aliens would have Aliens Anthology as collection name. You can make your own collections by filling in the set tag of all your movies you would want to group but its not really optimal since it can be overwritten if you re-scrape.

SmartPlaylist would be to group certain movies together based on built-in conditions and should be used to make a list like "Kids Movies".

Tags is what you would use to do what you mention in your example above. Tags will allow you to chose the movies you want to group together.Look it up in the wiki. Depending on the skin your using, to use your newly created tag as a menu, you might need to make it a favorite.

[steve1977]

Movieset are for defined collections mostly. If you scrape movies using the internal scraper of xbmc, the <set> tag of the nfo file will be filled with the collection name..like Aliens would have Aliens Anthology as collection name. You can make your own collections by filling in the set tag of all your movies you would want to group but its not really optimal since it can be overwritten if you re-scrape.

SmartPlaylist would be to group certain movies together based on built-in conditions and should be used to make a list like "Kids Movies".

Tags is what you would use to do what you mention in your example above. Tags will allow you to chose the movies you want to group together.Look it up in the wiki. Depending on the skin your using, to use your newly created tag as a menu, you might need to make it a favorite.

Thanks for your quick reply. Can you elaborate more why I would use "tags" rather than moviesets for my purpose and how it would actually make a difference?

Movieset - I could add the <set> tage to all Disney animated movies and then have the group.

Playlist - I could add all Disney animated movies to a playlist

Tags - I could "tag" them as a "video library tag" to have a separate library. This for me appears to be the most complex of the 3 options and I wouldn't know what benefit it brings over the other 2?

[jmarshall]

Tags+Smartplaylist is what I would use.

Advantage of a smartplaylist + tags: You get a new movie. All you need do is specify the tag and it's automatically included in whatever playlists you have setup.

Tags have the advantage that they're a m:n relation, like genres. i.e. a movie can have more than one tag such as "Disney" and "Animated". You could then have smartplaylists for Disney films or Animated films (or both).

Sets are for collections as defined by the databases we connect to. A movie can have only one set. So the Toy Story series might be in one, but wouldn't be in the same collection as The Lion King.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[steve1977]

Tags+Smartplaylist is what I would use.

Advantage of a smartplaylist + tags: You get a new movie. All you need do is specify the tag and it's automatically included in whatever playlists you have setup.

Tags have the advantage that they're a m:n relation, like genres. i.e. a movie can have more than one tag such as "Disney" and "Animated". You could then have smartplaylists for Disney films or Animated films (or both).

Sets are for collections as defined by the databases we connect to. A movie can have only one set. So the Toy Story series might be in one, but wouldn't be in the same collection as The Lion King.

Got it, thanks! Then indeed moviesets are out of picture as I would "need" the m:n relation to do what I am planning to do.

Can "tags" be included in NFO files? I am asking as I would prefer not to "tag" through the GUI, but do this through an external program like EMM.

My dream is to even have my trakt.tv lists then being synced with the "playlists" (I have a separate thread running for this request). Would this be a major under-taking and who would be best to contact about developing this? XBMC team, EMM team or trakt.tv team?

Thanks again!!!

[saitoh183]

If Emm supports tags. Other programs like MediaElch and Tiny Media Manager do

[steve1977]

Thanks a lot. One more question. Let's assume that I succeed to add "tags". Is there any easy way to create playlist around all my tags (i.e., all movies tagged "disney" are one playlist, all movies tagged "animated" become a separate playlist.

Do I need to this manually playlist by playlist (i.e., manually typing the word "disney") or is there an automated way that i can create playlists for all tags?

[The_Dogg]

if you use the GUI to create the playlist you can browse for existing tags (no need to type).

but smart playlist are just XML files so you can create 1 and just modify the text

example of a smart playlist that uses tags:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<smartplaylist type="movies">
    <name>Movies Children</name>
    <match>all</match>
    <rule field="tag" operator="is">
        <value>Children</value>
    </rule>
    <order direction="ascending">sorttitle</order>
</smartplaylist>

or you can simply browse to the tags section of the movie library and enter your tag, it will list all movies with that tag

[jmarshall]

And custom video nodes use a similar layout.