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i totally understand what you mean about being able to talk to a pvr solution, hopefully that is a goal of mediaportal. i still think that the sheer amount of content that xbmc users have warrants a new section devoted to television episodes. it is a different type of medium, and is browsed in different ways than movies are. sure, if we had one or two shows, it wouldn't matter, but with full seasons being available and rss autonomy getting popular, i think its something that needs to be pondered. i also think that tv centric features may be stifled while keeping them all in one section called videos. by breaking it out, you would be surprised by what might come out of it.
its almost 2005, pvr's are a normal thing, but not the only thing. by using rss and bittorrent, i can get my shows with the same ease. and the quality looks much better, i'd rather do it this way and keep everything digital. we don't need a pvr solution to have a reason to break out tv into its own section.
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yah, tv guide would be odd at the root. but at the same time, its odd if you can't do anything with that information, which will be nice when/if there is a frontend for mp. personally, i'm done with mpeg2 encoding of live tv, it looks terrible in my opinion. i'm sick of my tivo, and i'm sick of all the ads.
regarding your video filesystem structure, i'm pretty sure thats what everyone is doing. me, i have a media server my xboxs connect to though, so all the content is centralized, and i have a tv share and a movie share. then the content is organzized within those. i have a tv drive and a movies drive, so since windows does a terrible job and can't relaly make a symlink, i have to have 2 shares. so i'm basically one level higher than you, which takes 4-5 clicks to get to my content, if we can get rid of one of those, it would be great.
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i agree with both gamester and jmarshall.
i think if there is going to be a my tv section added it should indeed be able to access livetv. if i am not mistaken what forza is working on (upnp) should make a complete interface with mediaportal possible. i think if there is an interface done with a pc application that it should be very easily configured (mediaportal is easy to setup, but still needs to mature a bit more). the general consensus seems to have been that xbmc should not be bloated, i feel that if something like this is not extremely newbie friendly it would not really be useful and in my opinion would become bloatware. (i expect someone to hit on the linksboks integration regarding bloat, lol).
along with what jmarshall suggested, under a my tv section your tv media could be added to this section so you could perform a tvtome lookup on different episodes and such.
regarding mynci's work on a tv-guide, it would be great if it could be done mythtv style using zap2it from datadirect. it is extremely easy to setup tv-guide in mythtv and would be very versatile for people to be as accurate as possible.
i am not sure of any really good torrent sites to grab tv content from, but it would also be cool if it were possible to browse through a tv torrent site similar to how you can browse shoutcast from my music. i know it would also require a bit torrent client be ported to xbmc or used on a pc to work, but then you could select and episode to start downloading. doubt something like this would be likely to happen for legal reasons, but it would seem to me it shouldn't matter since xbmc is technically just source. :p
just my .02
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i have all my movies setup and workng under my videos, but i'm not sure what to do with my tv shows. i don't want them mixed in with my movies because i currently have 100+ episodes each of seinfeld, cheers, and south park and i really don't want to have to wade through all of those when i'm looking for a movie. i would much prefer them to be seperated.
i would think that most people who have a decent size video collection would likely have both movies and tv series. so how do you guys handle this? is there a way to create a seperate screen/database for tv shows?
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thanks for replying. i'll have to learn about activewindow calls and the buttonscroller to know how to implement them. i'm pretty new to xbmc. does this allow two totally seperate views that aren't tied to each other? also, can i have multiple shares with the same bookmark name? (ex. my movies span across my d:,e:,f:,g:, and h: drives)
i tried making a submenu like someone suggested, but the problem there is that it works off of the myvideos db and when i get the submenu view setup like i want, my vidoes defaults to the same view (which is no good for browsing my movies) unless i change it again. not to mention the fact that my tv shows are ripped in dvd format so my filing system looks like c:\seinfeld\s01e01 - pilot\video_ts\video_ts.ifo. this means that in file view i can get a listing of the series names and then click on one to see the list of epsiodes, but i can't just click on an episode to play it i still have to click on the video_ts folder to open it, then navigate to the video_ts.ifo file and click it to start the show. this is anything but user friendly.
i am surprised that xbmc doesn't have more flexibility. i would think that the database would be able to handle pretty much anything. i have worked with meedio quite a bit and you can do anything with it's db. it will give any views you want with whatever file structure that you have. all you have to do is supply a tag mask. also, you can add completely new categories to as well.
also, i'm surprised that anyone would say that a seperate tv section is not needed until there are some ties to pvr. why? what does a pvr have to do with it? i don't use a pvr at all. all my tv episodes have been ripped from dvds.
edit: just to make it clear, i am new to xbmc and there may very well be ways to do this. i'm just truying to figure it out.
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i agree with seven5. there needs to be a tv episode section. specifically, i think it needs it's own database. those of us who rip their dvd's into the standard dvd format (ifo's and vob's) find the traditional file view quite un-user-friendly since we need to click all the way down to video_ts.ifo file. switching to title view is preferred, but once you mix movies with tv episodes it loses it's effectiveness. i have around 160 movies along with about 200 tv episodes on my server. i would have to scroll through all those episodes just to find a movie. consider that all the episodes from one series (say seinfeld) will have the same icon, and it's easy to see where the whole list of videos becomes quite a mess.
imho movies are handles perfectly in title view. xbmc needs an additional area for tv shows that can be viewed something like this:
click on tv episodes button to go to a view that shows easch series (seinfeld, cheers, south park, etc.) along with an icon/pic for each. click on a series and see a list of episodes for that series. here, users should be able to highlight an episode and hit info to view the episode summary (tv.com could provide the data) or select the episode to begin playing it.
i don't think it even has to be a seperate button on the home page. i think it would be fine if you went into my videos and then had a button for tv episodes. so long as they are handled seperately and could have independent views.
just my $0.02
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it could be a completely different way to go about it. rather than say seeing the simpsons episodes you have you could browse by simpsons episodes that exist. get sysnopsis and extra info on that episode. play the episode if you have it or tell emule/bit torrent on your pc you want that episode. depending on how interactive it is you could even see the progress of that downloading episode.
it could be a cool one stop shop to watch your favorite shows and easily fill in the missing parts.
