[Hornet]

Hello,

I'm trying to solve a common problem, to which the magic bullet is advertised as custom video nodes, but they seem even less effective than a smart playlist is.

More specifically, I have my main media library organised in folders as follows:

Anime/
Anime Films/
Episodes/
Films/

And would like a button on the main menu for each, which acts like the native 'Films' and 'TV Shows' nodes, but within the subset of the library dictated by the folder structure, with this restriction applied to widgets and submenus.

"Just create a custom video node or smart playlist for each type and remove/hide the original film and tv show nodes" I hear you all say. I have tried both a normal video node, and a parent video node, for 'path starts with...' and neither works as expected.

Parent video nodes, when selected, dump me at a menu for all the subnodes, then they appear on screen as expected when chosen. The main menu entry lacks the film widgets, background fanart, etc.

Normal video nodes, ask me to chose an 'image folder' when I try to add the node to the menu. As I seem unable to find whatever it is it expects me to find, I've not managed to add one successfully. I've the feeling I managed it once, somehow, but it was incorrect still and haven't been able to reproduce it since. No idea what I did though or even if I did it, I've tried so many things it's all melted into one ball of fail in my mind now.

Smart playlists are quite close, but lack any of the magic options that usually operate on nodes, such as year, genre, etc. With about 120 anime series in my library, this is a nice feature to have access to sometimes. Also the little sub-filtering option on top, eg 'in progress', 'recently added' etc, seems not to work properly with playlists, sometimes the option text is displayed as blank.


So in short, is this possible yet, and if so, how? It's hopefully evident that I've tried a lot already. I'm getting the feeling that smart playlists, with custom 'fanart' in a directory set to be used by that node alone, and an entirely custom lower menu powered by a set of specific playlists for each node, might be a close approximation, albeit without the 'top sub-filter' working correctly. But there -must- be a better way? This isn't an uncommon problem. I can only hope that I'm missing something.

This is all written off of the top of my head after many hours messing around with it over the last couple of days. I'm not in front of the HTPC at the moment so I might have misstated a few things; apologies if so. Please don't hesitate to ask for any more information required, and I can create annotated screenshots if that would help explain anything more clearly. Lastly, I'm running XBMCbuntu, version 13.1 I believe.

Many thanks for any assistance offered,
Hornet

[Samu-rai]

Use smart playlists using the 'path contains' rule, as described here:

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=150934

Then make copies of each of these playlists. So for example if you wanted to have:

Anime films
Anime films (by Year)
Anime films (by Genre)

Then make 2 copies of the Anime films playlist (one for years & one for Genre).

Open these copies in a text editor and add <group>xxxx</group>. e.g <group>genres</group> in the genre playlist.

This will then give you a playlist which is filtered by that particular group.

Assuming the smart playlist is set up correctly and added as a main menu item then the widgets will also work as if it were the main library.

Hope that helps.

[Hornet]

Many thanks for that, I had a feeling I may have to do something along those lines.

I've set up the main menu to use 4 smart playlists as described, 1 for each type mentioned above, and this is very close to ideal, with some messing around I can fill in the gaps, eg fanart backgrounds, genre/year/studio submenus as outlined, etc.

However, one problem I can't see a workaround for is that the main menu widgets don't seem to correctly show 'in progress' for the submenu in question. It's as if it's trying to show 'each episode that's in progress', rather than 'the next unseen episode of a currently unfinished series'. I tested this by stopping an episode part-way through, and it then appeared in the menu. Recently added works perfectly though.

That feature was one of the most useful XBMC had to offer, so if I cannot replicate that via playlist, I may have to revert to one ugly mess of mixed media for the episodes... something I'm very keen to avoid if possible.

I was under the impression that custom video nodes were the magic bullet that solved all these problems by pre-filtering the content that widgets etc saw and operated on, without having to hoop-jump like this? Am I misunderstanding, or does this skin simply not work this way? At the end of the day though, I'm just trying to solve a problem as best I can, and will use whatever means are required to do so.

Some screenshots for clarity. This is the default TV Shows menu entry, renamed; as you can see fanart appears, 'in progress' shows the next episode due to be watched, etc, but mixes up anime and live action.

This is the Anime smart playlist. No fanart, no 'in progress', unless I manually play an episode and stop part way through. If I enter the menu entry directly, everything displays as it should, eg the playlist is set up correctly.

Thanks again for your time.

[Samu-rai]

Nodes generally achieve the same thing as playlists, but I have never used them so can't help you with that unfortunately.

What you're experiencing could be because MQ5 uses the randomandlastitems script for playlist widgets, rather than the skin widgets as it does with 'regular' library buttons.

The feature you are referring to is called 'recommended' in skin widgets. It could be that randomandlastitems doesn't have this.

[Hornet]

I see... so is there any way around this? Using playlists, nodes, anything really. All I wish to do is have the widgets working correctly on library subsets.

I'm a coder myself so I'm not at all averse to editing things if needed, but would really rather avoid forking the entire damn skin if it's possible.

If your guess is correct, then I wonder, how does the skin differentiate between custom nodes and default ones? It seems to handle them very differently, I thought the whole point of nodes was that they were an almost native way to filter content. I might have to try this in Nox as a sanity check.

[Samu-rai]

My suggestion would be to save yourself a lot of time and effort, and use the addon LazyTV to get the feature you want, in MQ5, while having all the content separated.

http://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:LazyTV