aoaaron Wrote:i'd like smart playlists to NOT be linked.
i.e. if i want to view my animes smart playlist by banner, i dont want to have to view my other smartplaylist via something else.
Would that be a skin customisation issue possibly?
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Ok, so I've dug around a bit and not seen something (in development or suggested) that matches, so either my search skills are not up to par or it's just not been floated as an idea.
In essence I'm trying to combat the difficulty in navigating an ever growing library. Mine has grown and grown over the last 5 (6?) years since I started meddling with XBMC, and in that time and with the family growing the amount of media grew exponentially there for a bit. Profiles help a little, though it's a little clunky to go back and forth and maintain (not a gripe, just comment from my perspective), and whilst smart playlists look to hold the potential to achieve exactly what I'm after they fall just short of the target.
Smart playlists are awesome, and in my opinion they work much better for music than they do for TV or film. No drama, that was their original intent after all.
Smartlists are very much driven in their current state by how storage is structured or how media is scraped (or manually entered).
What I would really like would be a flexible 'favourites' system, groups set up that could be added to the main menu like "Rom-com favourites" (to keep the missus happy), "Kids favourites" (for the short-rounds in the house), "Action favourites" etc etc and have them able to be dynamically built by browsing the 'full' library and "tagging" (for want of a better word right now) library items.
Smart playlists almost do that, I can for example create a storage hierarchy where the movies sit in particular folders based on what 'groups' I'd like. I can have a "Kids" folder, an "Action" folder, a "Sci-fi" folder, a "Rom-com" folder etc etc. But it takes placement in the playlists out of control of XBMC, or the user, and puts it in the hands of the person doing the file storage.
My idea would be to combine the use of the existing 'favourites' functionality with that of the smart playlists by simply adding another field to smart playlists: isfavourite [true/false]
I could then have 2 smart playlists, one called "Rom-com" and one called "Rom-com Favourites". "Rom-com" could be populated based on where files are stored (or genre's assigned from scraping, whatever tickles the fancy) and "Rom-com Favourites" could be a union of the "Rom-com" playlist with the addition of a "Is Favourite" field = True argument.
It might seem trivial, but if there are 250 movies in any genre and the person browsing just wants to watch something they know they enjoy, but aren't sure what, even if they only spend a second per movie it can still take a number of minutes to browse the entire genre. I know, choice sucks :p, but I'd like to refine it.
Which brings me to my questions (predicated by the fact that I'm going to attempt this, just would like a little advice on whether or not to bother before doing so):
1) Is this being discussed, called something else, anywhere else and I've just missed it?
2) Would this be better done with scripting rather than adding directly to the functionality of smart playlists?
3) If I'm reading this thread correctly, and assuming nothing has changed (I'm cloning from github as I type), smart playlists are simply SQL queries so it should be relatively simple to add a join to another table, right? (this assumes favourites are stored in a table of course).
Thoughts? I'm about to dig into it to see if I can make this happen, my biggest concern is that I'd rather not waste time doing this if someone else is already working on something similar.
