Video library redesign idea - How can we improve Smart Playlists, aka Filtered Lists?

Thanks for all your contributions - I've pretty much nailed down what we require as far as the backend goes with respect to grouping and so on.

The user interface is now my current focus.

Many of you don't seem aware that most of the stuff you're asking for can already be done by the smartplaylist system.

Clearly, it's non-optimal as far as the interface of it goes, though I suspect the biggest problem is the fact that you have to go into playlists in order to select or generate one.

I'd encourage everyone to go and give them a go, and see what you like and what you don't like about the process required to set them up and so on.

My current thoughts is that they'll be broken down into two:

1. A simplified process that can be used for "on the fly" filters that can apply to any 'title' based listing (eg "show watched only", or "show action or thriller films only"), to replace the current "watched/unwatched" toggle.
2. A general "Filtered listing" node that essentially just places a predefined smartplaylist at some point in the video library heirarchy. Similar to how "Recently added movies" is placed for instance.

Cheers,
Jonathan

I love the playlists. The one thing I had some trouble with was grouping and's and or's. Example, I wanted a listing of all the currently running TV shows that the wife and I watch and then unwatched episodes of said shows. As far as I could tell, the only way to do that was to create a playlist of current TV shows (House OR Grey's Anatomy OR The Mentalist) and then use that playlist in another playlist that added AND playcount less than 1 clause. So it was an 'or' list with an 'and' list. I did't see any other way to make that work. Is there any way to hide that 'or' list? I only need it for the other playlist. Or is there any other way around that?

Otherwise, if I could make that playlist show up in a different area, it would be PERFECT. Then I think people could do most of those other things with a playlist right now. (Also, it would be great if you could create a playlist through the web interface so you could use a keyboard. I haven't looked if it is already possible. If it is, sorry.)

J_K_M_A_N

This is a problem, I agree, but it's non-trivial to display this sort of thing in the user interface, given that one has to allow nested ands within ors or ors within ands and so on. For example,

{rule1} OR {rule2} OR {rule3} AND {rule4}

might be interpreted by some as "at least one of rule 1, 2, or 3 is holds, and rule 4 also must hold" whereas in reality it's "at least one of rule 1, rule 2, or the combination of rule 3 and rule4 must hold".

That's why I chose to go the easy way out: You only get ors or ands in a single filter, but you can combine filters.

Now, one way to improve on this is allowing more scope in a single rule. For instance, we could combat your situation quite well, as the or's are all on the one field, so the 3 rules you have could be combined into a single rule via some sort of multiple select on the genres. Then you combine that rule (via AND) with your watched rule and you're done.

You can't handle all cases in this way though - ideas most welcome

Cheers,
Jonathan

jmarshall Wrote:Thanks Aaron. I presume you are meaning filtering by IMDb rating, rather than browsing by it?

Cheers,
Jonathan

Yes, that's true.

jmarshall Wrote:Now, one way to improve on this is allowing more scope in a single rule.

...

You can't handle all cases in this way though - ideas most welcome

What about the idea of having smartplaylists that aren't displayed. So you can build up arbitrarily complex rules, and flag the rule as "not displayed" because its only ever used in another rule.

@jmarshall, did you manage to get "Video Database Library Movie Grouping (for custom sort order filter in library mode)" into this somehow as well?:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=14476

Basically to be able to group sequential movies with non-sequential names for such 'groups' or 'series' (usually epic sagas that are followed by each other) as; Alien, Dirty Harry, Fast and Furious, Indiana Jones, Grindhouse (Death Proof and Planet Terror), James Bond (007), Lord Of The Rings, Star Wars, Transporter, Rambo, Planet Of The Apes, Sällskapsresan, Jump London and Jump Britain.

gamerzhaven81 Wrote:Example...

I have the Die Hard series...

Die Hard
Die Harder
Die Hard: With A Vengeance
Live Free, Die Hard

The first three get put next to one another, and due to the naming even in the right order, the last one is nowhere near these due to starting with an L

jmarshall Wrote:This is a problem, I agree, but it's non-trivial to display this sort of thing in the user interface, given that one has to allow nested ands within ors or ors within ands and so on. For example,

{rule1} OR {rule2} OR {rule3} AND {rule4}

might be interpreted by some as "at least one of rule 1, 2, or 3 is holds, and rule 4 also must hold" whereas in reality it's "at least one of rule 1, rule 2, or the combination of rule 3 and rule4 must hold".

That's why I chose to go the easy way out: You only get ors or ands in a single filter, but you can combine filters.

Now, one way to improve on this is allowing more scope in a single rule. For instance, we could combat your situation quite well, as the or's are all on the one field, so the 3 rules you have could be combined into a single rule via some sort of multiple select on the genres. Then you combine that rule (via AND) with your watched rule and you're done.

You can't handle all cases in this way though - ideas most welcome

Cheers,
Jonathan

I think that is the problem. There is no good way (that I can think of) to handle things like that. It could group in different ways. I think that it works fine with the smartplaylist though.

It would just be nice to be able to name the smartplaylist whatever you want AND make it show up in a different section (maybe from a dropdown or something). For instance, you could make a smartplaylist that groups the movies together (like die hard) and tell the playlist to list in the movies->titles section and name it die hard series or something like that. I think that may take care of some of the grouping issues that Gamester17 was talking about. But you could also make a smart playlist that grouped genre's and list them somewhere. Then you wouldn't need to have that listing. It could be a smartplaylist instead.

Just an idea.

J_K_M_A_N

On the topic of smartplaylists, I would love to see an option for playlist is:

Movies
TV Shows
Music Videos

Where you can choose, all, two, or just one. It could be done either with tick boxes or a spinner with all the combinations. I ran into this in my previously posted endeavor to create a Christmas playlist for the kids. I wanted to add all the movies who have a genres of Christmas (which I set manually with Media Companion) but also any shows that Christmas, Santa, etc in the Title or plot. I thought that would not only grab any movies that I might have missed with custom genre tags, but also add any tv episodes like the Simpsons Christmas episodes since they would have one of the key words in the plot or title. As far as I know there is still no way to make a mixed movies and tv episode smartplaylist.

Cheers,
Rand

@Rand Al Thor: Yeah - the trouble is that some fields only apply to some "content types". I guess in general people would use them in "or" conditions, so it shouldn't really be too much of a problem, however - the pros outweight the cons.

@J_K_M_A_N: You've identified a key difference between "filter nodes" and "category nodes". Filtered nodes just filter the title list by whatever criteria you specify (i.e. they give you the title list of a particular genre for instance). Category nodes, on the other hand, list all possible values from the chosen category, thus giving a hierarchy. Category is useful for browsing all possible genres, Filter is useful for browsing movies within a predefined (set of) genre(s).

Note that it makes no sense for "filter nodes" to be present inside a particular title level node. They're only allowed on the same level (or higher) than a title level node. Title level nodes only list titles (movies or shows). Thus, filter nodes within themselves wouldn't handle "stacking" all your 007 movies in a title listing of all movies. The "stacking" would have to be handled separately, and to be honest, I'm not sure at this point quite how to handle that - will have a think about it. I'm always concerned about over generalizing to the point where it becomes unmanageable for the user. There's a subtle difference in filtering and stacking: Filtering removes items that don't match the filter, whereas stacking combines items that match the filter, and leaves items that don't match alone.

For the filters/smartplaylists, my thinking is the filters that are applied "on the fly" to a particular listing would basically be made up of a single "rule" as is currently in the smartplaylist editor.

The rule dialog would be enhanced, however. I'm think of a list of all fields that may be filtered on, where you can select the conditions to apply to each field in turn. This allows rules to span several fields, perhaps with a switch to toggle from AND or OR between fields. Clicking on the "genre" field for instance would popup a multiselect dialog allowing you to choose which genres you want included. Multiple selections would be OR, ofcourse. For time based fields you'd have a range you can specify in some way (eg before X, after X, between X and Y). For non-category fields (eg title, plot etc.) it'd be a "contains" or "doesn't contain" thing.

Key points:
* a single "filter" or "rule" encompasses a single condition per field.
* each condition is simplified in some cases (non-category fields either "contains" or "doesn't contain", and enhanced in others (multi-select on category fields).
* some fields we currently have may need dropping in some cases, due to managability (actors for instance are hard to filter on - imagine a multi-select dialog with 10000 actors in it...)

Comments most welcome.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Speaking of recently added, I would like the existing 'recently added movies/episodes' to actually show recently added (as in file date preferably) instead of recently added/updated/refreshed.

refreshing existing movie's/episode's info, should not cause them to be re-added to the recently added list.