Option to add additional custom genres to the databases, scrapers, & library filters?

robweber Wrote:I've begun work on a very basic implementation of a category feature. I know I said I wouldn't be interested a few post back but I had some free time and wanted to play around with the source code. it is very basic, but working. Here is a link to the thread.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=64687

I'm very glad you changed your mind. Please find my comments in new thread you opened.

Hi,

would it be useful to add two new sections to the home menu? As I could find in the forum there are many people who have a lot videos of this kind and problems organizing them.

I saw many suggestions on how to work around this problem, but I think it would be quite useful to implement these section from the start (maybe disabled by default in the settings), so nobody has to deal with own customizations of skins or several different accounts in XBMC.

In "Concerts", I would place all the concerts and shows of comedians or bands and in "Documentaries"... documentaries.

If more people would find this useful too, i will create a trac ticket.

Regards
Overlurk

It's been requested alot... everyone has someodd ball videos that don't fit into Movies... may be concerts or documentaries for you, may be yoga videos for someone else...

The video database is one day going to be overhauled to allow this... But for now there's only kludgy workarounds (smart playlists, different profiles, put all your concerts in a set, etc...)

Thats why i'm requesting it... Maybe it would be more elegant to build in a custom video function, that allows every user to create their own section like a sports section for the yoga guys and documentaries for me.

This shouldn't be that complicated, its basically just another kind of movies, like videos.

Maybe that would be possible for every media type, so you could make you own section for audio books if you don't want them to rest in our music section.

is this possible by changing some xml files?

A good amount of the skins have the option to add Custom Home Items, and if not built into the skin there's probably a mod...

I know this has been talked about before and there's been some talk of handling items in the new db but that seems it could be a long way off and would be great to see some way of handling "unscrapeable" files in the library.

Particularly with TV I find I am now using xbmc pretty much exclusively now for my viewing, whilst the library mode is great for running tv shows as my collection of documentaries and one off shows grows I find the current library does not fit and file mode is not efficient enough.

Is there any way it could be modified to allow items to be stored in the library which are not being scraped without requiring manual creation of loads of nfo files?

This would make managing non serialized shows, home videos and sporting events much simpler and more efficient.


I'd propose it creates a library item in the db for every file it encounters using filename for title and leaving everything else as not available as it would do currently if there was a missing plot or certificate when the file is scanned.

In the case of TV shows my idea would be to use a similar structure to current, so Source\Show\Season\Episode, being constructed and listed as Source\FolderName\Folder Name\File Name.

In the example of documentaries I'd have a source "Other TV" in which Id have a folder "Documentaries" and underneath folders for documentary types "music", "wildlife", etc and then shows in each. XBMC Ideally would scan so documentaries appears as a show entry then when entering instead of listing sesaon 1,2,3... it would list the folder names and home the episodes within.

If you want to add extra info .nfo files can then be manually created but not required.

This would also be done on movies when no match is found and would make finding missing content from the library far simpler.

Cheers

Are the any plans to make the library functionality more flexible and allow for user defined sections that can appear as new items on the main menu in addition to the existing TV Shows and Movies?

I've done some searching and haven't found anything exactly like this. I know there's a manual workaround for home movies and video categories but not.

Some of these posts sort of hint to some of the same concepts but not quite.
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=51605
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=61779
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=58896

If there is a plan or existing feature for this then I apologise. Post the url and I'll add my thoughts/comments to it.

The last major update to Plex introduced pretty much the exact functionality I was looking for but I don't have a Mac and I like XBMC better anyway.

Quote:Alexandria allows a library to have unlimited sections. For example, you might have a “Documentaries” section, a “Home Movies” section, an “Anime” section, and a “Foreign Films” section, all configured to suit the media.

It would be awesome if you as a user could do the following:

• Define new video sections in addition to TV Shows or Movies
• Each new section would be accessible from the main menu (or at least easily added to the main menu)
• Examples of new sections would be "Documentary", "Sports", "MMA", "Stand-up Comedy", "Anime" etc.
• Could still use existing scrapers as most of these are already available on TVDB and TheMovieDB etc.
  

This isn't the same as filtering by Genre. The main difference is that the content in the new video sections would be kept separate from other sections so that you don't see them when browsing your regular shows or movies. The secondary issue with Genres is that they are typically to broad and include far too many for each movie. Manually adding NFO files just isn't practical past a few hundred movies. Perhaps if there was an internal interface for selecting genres for movies but that's a different feature.

For example even though UFC can be scraped from TheMovieDB and I wouldn't want these mixed in when browsing the rest of my movies.

Suggested Process

1. Keep all files for custom section in separate folder
2. Add folder in XBMC
3. Select content type and new option for "Custom"
4. Type name for "Custom"content type OR select from existing "Custom" types
5. Select scraper parent type for your custom type (e.g. archetype movies, tv shows, music, music videos)
6. Select specific scraper e.g. TheMovieDb or IMDb (based on which parent type you selected)
7. Skins could by default use the parent type of the custom section (e.g. if you selected archetype TV Shows)
   

These are just suggestions. There might be a better process or better way of doing this. One potential problem using the parent type is that you are restricted to a single parent type for a custom section when you might want to include both movies and TV shows.

E.g. MMA might include UFC which is interpreted as movies but also include something like Ultimate Fighter which is a TV Show

Perhaps keeping the Custom section separate from the scraper type would allow for even better flexibility i.e. selecting the custom section to list it under when adding a folder and keeping the scraper specific to the folder but not the custom section.

If this is not possible already (I've always got the impression that it was doable somehow but I could be mistaken), I definitely second the request (suggestion might be a better word ).

Woah, this would actually be a great addition... the wife would be extremely pleased if we could separate out Home Videos, Sports, and Documentaries from "Videos".