Hallo,
I have 1000+ movies in my library.
Mostly I use the Title thing, however, sometimes my titles get screwed up by the scraper and renamed, so i cannot find a movie. Then a search by actor or the file mode helps. (examples: P.O.C, instead of the long name Pirates of the carribbean, CE3K instead of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Burly Man instead of Matrix reloaded etc. - things that drive me crazy
)
The main issue is, that grouping of movies is not easy and the titles are mixed all over the library.
The WAF is quite low, my wife complains about the UI, that she never comes beyond the letter "F" if she looks after a movie to play, because there are too many movies alphabetically sorted and a lot of "scrap" from my favorites and she always has to start by title and "A" and is tired reading after "F", so she plays always the same few "good" movies she finds after a while.
The Genres are good, but not good enough - too many and automaticaly imported / changed. In my last home library setup before using xbmc I had managed the genres manually to fit my wifes needs and she was happy to find her favorite 100 movies easily. I had added some Cartoons, XMas, Romance and Action Tags, and one for my wife's name as special genre - so she has had her own set, when she wants.
With xbmc this is too complicated and it is screwed up by scrapers - so finally I gave up - especially because I have some xbmc boxes, and each needs to scrape the content (and alters the metadata or needs manual adjustments) - this is a nightmare.
To make it short:
85% by title,
10% by directory / filename not using the library at all
4% by actor,
1% by genre
I also have set up some file groups for die hard, american pie, harry potter, star treck and one for "_xmas" movies for my wife to check this out. But this screws up the concept of the title thing - so it is good for my wife, bad for the library, but in the end good for the peace at home - (it is the first entry before the letter "A")
.
If I could make 3 whishes:
- If a title is manually entered/modified - don't change it by further scans (Title, Genre, Ratings...) (lock flag in the database and file system nfo!)
- Supply an easy to use UI to change the metadata in XBMC (no external tools) and populate the changes toall instances.
- Easy grouping interface for movie sets, where one movie can belong to more than one group, so one can build a kind of custom structure. (e.g. home made, vacations, birthday parties, kids, wife's only, man's world, kid's cartoons, teen's favorites, unrated alphabethically.