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

I wouldn't mind looking for movies by actor but like you said, there are way too many and the list takes like 5 minutes to load. I just use smart playlists. Now that I figured out how to use multiple they are really nice. It sounds like you want to make something like the smart playlists but easier to access which would be perfect IMO. I have a feeling most people have the flatten button on anyway.

J_K_M_A_N

I use the actor filter a lot. I know I want to watch a movie that has a particular actor in it but can't remember the name of the movie. I filter by actor name and then I can go down the list of movies, when I see the name I remember it.

Mike

I personally only use the Year and Genre categories.

I have 2000+ movies so of course navigating them and finding what I want is a chore without these specialized filters and honestly making abunch of smart playlists that aren't even easily accessible from the main gui isn't viable either.

I would love to use actors, but like said it loads 1000s of them and its not efficient at all. I've always wondered if you could make the actors category only show actors that have a picture associated. This would weed out a lot of the no name extras I don't care about. We would still have a lot of actors but it would eliminate so many.

It's been requested many times, but we really do need some kind of grouping ability. Put some kind of tag in the nfo <group>James Bond</group> It would then be easy to have the grouped items show in the overall movie views in their respective group but sorted by year. Or you could have a tag that you could manually choose the order ie. <Sort Order>1</Sort Order>

Having this "Group" filter accessible like the current options would be a blessing. Would really help to organize things. So I could see myself selecting Groups or whatever it's called and seeing

Disney Movies
James Bond
Star Wars
Star Trek

So I use genre for this now, but having a separate option built around this idea would be fantastic.

I only use "title" to start the search in my library mode.

Would it be possible to use the path tag to create an extra 'filter' ?
Path => <path>smb://NAS/ShareLevel1/ShareLevel2/</path>

Another vote for the Year filter from me. I use it quite often to find recent movies in my 800+ movie collection.

Hey Jm,


I use genres all the time. I have made custom genres for all of my Holiday movies, so Christmas, Halloween, etc. The kids love this kind of stuff. So each year a couple weeks before Christmas I just go to Genres->Christmas and let the kids loose. I am pretty happy with the way things work right now (I use media companion to create any genres that don't exist and they import fine). The only thing I would really love to see is sort order and it looks like you are addressing this. That way I can get all the LOTR movies to show in proper order and the same with the bond flicks etc etc. Hope that helps.

I know some people sort their movies by grouping them in genre folders. This has never been an appealing option to me because a I feel that movies can belong to several genres and wouldn't want to limit them. For example, if you look under Action and don't see Indiana Jones, you might assume you just don't have the movie, when in reality it was in the Adventure category. I like being able to use both. Just my 2 cents.

Cheers,
Rand

my biggest suggestion would be to all the recent list to be bigger .. i used to use plex before i switched back to xbmc and the biggest thing i miss was the ability to set the size of recent count in plex .. i'd like my recently added list to be longer then just the default 25 as currently implemented

Thanks for the discussion. I request again that you try to keep it on topic - I realize there are many flaws with the current library, but I'm particularly wanting to nail down the usefulness or otherwise of browsing your collection from the current category nodes. None of the other things that have been brought up thus far has not already been considered for the new design.

@Dilligaf: You're use sounds like you really need to search for actors, rather than browse them, or do you enjoy looking through the list prior to selecting a movie?

@krypt2nite: I'm interested in whether my idea of filters on the main list would do the same thing for you. eg a filter button on the left that you specify "genre: action" would do the same thing, or whether you really need the list of genres or years to browse through. If so, that's fine - just trying to nail down the essential browsable folders that will be supported in order to keep things as contained as possible

@RickDeckard: Your use of "year" sounds like it could be handled by a filter easily enough - it's not really browsing your collection by year - rather, you just want to view recent films (eg last 4 years). This is smartplaylist-able at the moment for instance, so would fit in nicely with the new filter idea.

@Rand Al Thor: Sounds like filters would do the trick for you as well for that usage, or do you actually _browse_ by genre frequently?

@pletopia: The idea is for everything to be customisable under the hood - filtering by a true date added field is ofcourse on the cards.

Cheers,
Jonathan

jmarshall Wrote:One idea for a “filter” system is a Filter button which when clicked gives you a list of pre-configured filters, or allows you to design of a new filter, which is saved for later use. Similar to smartplaylists, but simplified down a bit, and available in any listing.

Yeah this sounds great. Would work out just fine if oriented towards grouping movies into a category you can name.

Please consider what buzzra said on the blog post also. I think this falls in to the current views category.

Quote:I mostly use the “Recently Added” node. I would like to see more flexibility in what shows up in this list. The main problem is that it shows movies recently “SCANNED” into the library not really “ADDED”. This means that old movied that get re-scanned, show up in the recently added list. I would also like to be able to choose the number of movies in this list, up to the entire database, sorted by ORIGINAL date added to the database.

jmarshall Wrote:@Rand Al Thor: Sounds like filters would do the trick for you as well for that usage, or do you actually _browse_ by genre frequently?

I do occasionally say, "hmm what do I want to watch? Action, Comedy..." It sounds like you would still be able to do this just in a different way. If I am understanding your proposed changes, instead of going up a node and then selecting genres, we would just pick a gui button or context button for Filter and it would have the option to filter by anything we can come up with, right? So, if I wanted to it list only Comedies, it would be just as easy as going to filter->genres->comedy or something along those lines. We could also have preset custom filters if I am understanding you. It sounds like this would be a great addition. It would have all of the functionality I use now and more. I think it might also be easier on the end user (wife, girlfriend, kids) to explain what the filter button does (which could be displayed in plain sight), instead of telling them to hit backspace to go up a directory then go to genres then...

Anyway, it sounds great to me.

Cheers,
Rand