Nested Sets?
#1
I was a long time user of Windows Media Center and Media Browser. A few months ago I switched over to XBMC and couldn't be happier. However, there's one thing I used to be able to do with Media Browser that I haven't been able to replicate in XBMC. I think the closest thing in XBMX parlance would be a nested set. I used to use these for different editions of movies.

For instance, take the Alien franchise. In Media Browser I had a folder structure like so:
Code:
Alien Anthology
     |- Alien
     |      |- Alien (Theatrical Edition)
     |      |- Alien (Special Edition)
     |- Aliens
     |      |- Aliens (Theatrical Edition)
     |      |- Aliens (Special Edition)
     |- Alien3
     |      |- Alien3 (Theatrical Edition)
     |      |- Alien3 (Special Edition)
     |- Alien Resurrection
            |- Alien Resurrection (Theatrical Edition)
            |- Alien Resurrection (Special Edition)

This way when I browsed my movie collection I would see one entry for Alien Anthology, enter into that and see the four Alien movies, enter into Alien and then be able to choose either the Theatrical or Special Edition.

Is there anyway to replicate this functionality in XBMC? Or something similar? If it's a standalone movie with multiple editions (Avatar, Blade Runner, Close Encounters, etc) I can just manually create a set, but when there's multiple editions that already exist as part of a set (Alien, Star Wars, etc), then being limited to a single set doesn't work as well. Another example would be the Matrix series. Each of the three movies fits nicely into a set, but then the Animatrix is either its own set or I have each title in the Animatrix showing up in the Matrix set and neither is really ideal. With Media Browser I would just have the Matrix series and inside of that would be the three movies and the Animatrix, which I could then drill into to see the individual Animatrix titles.

Any ideas? Is this already possible and I'm just missing something? Is this a possible feature request?

Thanks for any help you can offer.
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#2
Sure, just view XBMC in file view after you've scanned it into the library. You can set thumbnails on folders manually via the context menu, and actual movies will show full metadata.

Basically, using File view after things are scanned into the library will let you view your library however you wish to organize it.
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#3
Ah, cool... that's actually pretty close to what I'm looking for. Only two small problems that I'm hoping there's a solution for.

One is sorting. It appears I can only sort by file attributes (filename, date, etc). It's kinda throwing off the sorting on movie sets not being able to specify a sort order. Any ideas on how I can fix that?

Second is that, in this view, when I browse to a movie, it's like I have to open it twice. The first is opening the folder that it's in, then the second is the actual movie file itself. Any way to flatten it?
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#4
Not sure on 1

For 2, lefthand sidebar menu -> enable stacking
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#5
The other way of doing this is to scrape as normal so XBMC creates "Alien Collection" using info from tmdb.

In the library when you enter "Alien Collection" you should see 6 entries with what appears to be a duplicate pair for each movie, so you'll have:

2 x Alien
2 x Aliens
2 x Alien 3
2 x Alien: Resurrection

Open Context menu on each library entry and choose movie info then you'll see the file system path of the scraped item so you can tell which is which. Using this information go back to the Context menu and choose "edit title" and give it the appropriate name including whether it's Theatrical or Special Edition.

If you use NFO's then you can specify the title shown in the GUI with an <title> entry plus in addition you can change sorting with a <sorttitle> entry.
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Nested Sets?0