[paus]

I have 3 major categories for videos, Movie, TV Shows & Documentary. And it's very annoying not being able to use scrapers against Documentary and have it displayed at first screen, such as Movies and TV Shows.
As Documentaries are found in both movies and TV show scrapers they get listed lite here and there and I can't find a good way to get an overview.

Would be really nice to able to have "display containers" from several scrapers, instead of (or as choice) having them locked/sorted against which kind of scraper they where found in.

TTFN
//paus

[jmarshall]

In Frodo you can use filters on the main nodes. So, assuming your documentaries are flagged as such (eg use the genre "Documentary") then you could filter them out of the tvshow node (if that's what they scrape with) and add a separate node for documentaries.

At the moment, I don't think it's possible to combine from movies + tvshows, but maybe noone has tried...

[steve1977]

Wow, this is fantastic!!! I did not find it in the September monthly, but read that I would need to do this over advanced settings. Is it possible by now to do it via the GUI and/or coming for the beta release of Frodo? This is a fantastic feature!!! Also, one related question - would the "recently added movies / episodes" add-on be able to reflect this and then only show recently added documentaries?

[jmarshall]

Nope, not available via the GUI. Hopefully the ability to add new filter nodes (and remove existing ones) will be available via the context menu, but no promises as it depends on how difficult (read: how much new code) it is to pull it off.

Alterations to the home screen is unfortunately still skin-territory, so will require skin modifications to work. The default recently added stuff on home won't use the filter nodes, so will still retrieve the old stuff.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[steve1977]

Nope, not available via the GUI. Hopefully the ability to add new filter nodes (and remove existing ones) will be available via the context menu, but no promises as it depends on how difficult (read: how much new code) it is to pull it off.

Fingers crossed, this would really be great. As long as it will be limited to manual XML editing, I would assume limited usage and even less skin support for this.

Alterations to the home screen is unfortunately still skin-territory, so will require skin modifications to work. The default recently added stuff on home won't use the filter nodes, so will still retrieve the old stuff.

What would be required from the skin developers? Overall or the recently-added-stuff?

[steve1977]

Any thoughts?

[DiMag]

Most video documentaries are of episodic content and thus in the eyes of XBMC tvshows; many are of unitary content and thus in the eyes of XBMC movies. A persistent retort to users despair in trying to sort documentaries is "XBMC is so cool, use smart playlists and custom nodes, and in the final analysis use paths as filters". Guess what, they never tried it. You can mix only music and musicvideos in an XSP, not movies with tvshows; therefore a path-based rule is of as little help as is a genre-based rule (never mind that documentaries are not genres in the technical meaning of the term but a different document type).

The problem of arbitrary splitting between tvshows and movies is not restricted to documentaries, but it is here that it is really unbearable. You see, someone who is into documentaries tends to be used to categorizing using logic and terms with intrinsic meaning. Before long, he/she shall consider that XBMC's library mode is useless, shall change over to file mode, and while there, he/she shall dream of the good old days on the PC where file mode meant you could also search files using their filenames and inside files using their content. Oh, I forgot to mention that XBMC's so-called global search capability does not search inside this portion of NFO files called plot or outline or tagline where you are invited to put your comments on what this video is about.

[DiMag]

UPDATE 2022:

• Everything asked for in this thread about documentaries is feasible at little pain. Use smart playlists filtering either per path (IMHO the best approach), or per so-called genre.
  
• It is now possible to have "recently added" and "in progress" nodes (or playlists) filtered per path or genre, thus filtering only documentaries. 
  
• It isn't now, and in all probability shall never ever be, feasible to merge in the same video database videos with property HAS_EPISODES (tvshows) with videos which don't have this property ("movies"). It is not technically infeasible; Plex does it. It is just that Kodi having adopted this split design, it is as possible to remake it as it is to remake men and women as a single sex.
  
• It isn't technically infeasible to mix videos and tvshows in the same smart playlist (or custom video node), nor is it an operation of the magnitude of making the two sexes one. However, it still is infeasible in Kodi right now.
  
• The forced spilt between documentaries that are movies and those that are tvshows is easily circumvented as far as the UI is concerned. Make a main menu item "Documentary" with submenus including movie playlists and tvshow playlists. Even better, in addition collect all documentaries in a parent directory with at least two subdirectories, one for movies and one for tvshows. (This is also the precondition to path-filtering in the smart playlists.) And let the main menu button open in the parent directory.
  
• As to the question where to scrape documentary metadata, the answer remains "use the main scrapers". True, they are not optimized for documentareis. There are currently several sites offering optimized metadata/artwork for documentaries, however nobody has seen to it to write a scraper for them which could be used in Kodi. Things may change now that scrapers have moved from xml to python, but this is just a wish.    
  

 

[joshuaperez]

I don't have a solution to your problem, I dand use the TV app to watch all of that.