[Livin]

i'm hoping that the coders that made the "nav" view such a success with 'my music' will work the same magic with 'my videos'

i'd really like a view that would enable me to separate vidoes into categories depending on what folder they are in while still allowing me to view the movies in the 'title' format.

thus this would be a combo view so that we could navigate the folder stucture and still have the benefits of imdb and a one-click play on an item.

here's an example of what i would do for my home collection with explainations of each sections usage...

'my videos' link (in nav view)
- tv shows (uses 'file' view since no imdb avail)
* smb://mediaserver1/tvshowlibrary
- movie library (uses 'title' view)
* smb://mediaserver1/movielibrary
* smb://mediaserver2/movielibrary
* e:\movies
- new movies (uses 'title' view)
* smb://mediaserver1/moviesnew
- home videos (uses 'file' view)
* smb://mediaserver2/homevideos


the videos in the "new" sections may move to the "library" sections later, many are erased after viewing once. my "new" sections could be eliminated if there was an "auto-scan" so that when items are added or removed they are automatically added/removed from the database.

the videos in the "library" sections usually do not get removed, only added to. "auto-scan" would help here too!

[kraqh3d]

this will be coming, but it will all be database based. still working out how to identify differing types of video.

[Livin]

since tags do not exist for video files i think the simplest way is to use a folder structure to "id" the files and then have rule sets for display names.

i think most people store videos in folders anyway. i'd think they do not lump holleywood movies in with home videos. (maybe i'm wrong?)

by using folders as the "file type identifier" each user would be able to create as many types as desired. i'd think defining this in the xboxmediacenter.xml is ideal.

xbmc could scan folders to get the videos and display only the icons according to the rule sets.

the rule sets would create a "smart" naming scheme to setup a substitution scheme for naming videos in a "friendly" style...

examples:

1) dvd file structure

- scarface
- video_ts
video_ts.bup
video_ts.ifo
vts_01_0.bup
vts_01_0.ifo
...etc

displays as...
scarface (basically the imdb movie title)


2) tv shows

- lost
- lost_s1e12.avi
- lost_s2e1.avi

but the xbmc display would look like this...

lost - season 1, episode 12
lost - season 2, episode 1



i think it would make everything much more user friendly, especially for guests, and all the xbox owners need to do is setup (within xbmc) and keep the folder structure and naming scheme of the video files consistant on the shares.


what do you think?

[kraqh3d]

there's no use messing with dvd folders right now. they arent really supported well yet. i see this coming after the dvd player is official and enabled by default.

and regarding tv shows... i dont understand why people just dont name their files "nicely" to begin with. why does xbmc need to do all the work?

for what we have in mind, the database is required. it's the only way to effectively navigate a large collection of files with filtering like "my songs".

check out this thread. spiff has been working on expanding the content scraping which will allow alot of this functionality.

http://www.xboxmediaplayer.de/cgi-bin....t=11006