[canadave]

Hi...before I submit a bug report, just wondering if it's me. Is there any known issue with sorting titles in the video library alphabetically, if the titles begin with numbers?

For instance, in my movie library, I have these, ostensibly sorted in alphabetical order, displayed in this order:

5 Centimeters Per Second
12 Angry Men
50/50
2001: A Space Odyssey
2011 European Vacation

The rest of the video library, with titles starting with letters, is sorted perfectly.

I'm running a nightly Kodi 15 build, but I seem to recall seeing this (and not really noticing it until now) before, when I was running 14.1. Can anyone else confirm this?

[DJ_Izumi]

That's not an issue, it's how alphabetical sorting works. Numbers, then letters, and your movies in question specifically have DIGITS in their titles rather than the numbers written as words, in contrast to the movie 'Seven' which is officially named 'Seven' as a word rather than '7'.

It's SUPPOSED to work this way.

[canadave]

I understand digits come before letters, but what I'm getting at is that the movies that start with digits don't appear to be sorted properly, with regards to the digits themselves. For instance, in the list I gave above, proper alphabetizing would be thus:

12 Angry Men
2001: A Space Odyssey
2011 European Vacation
5 Centimeters Per Second
50/50

[DJ_Izumi]

You didn't notice that it's arranging them by value from smallest to largest?

[canadave]

Sorry, I'm not sure what you're talking about. How is:

5 Centimeters Per Second
12 Angry Men
50/50
2001: A Space Odyssey
2011 European Vacation

in order from smallest to largest?

EDIT: Oh, I see what you mean...the numbers themselves. Gotcha. But that's not really how proper alphabetizing should work. If the sort is alphabetizing, then the integer value of the numbers should not be the basis for the sort.

[DJ_Izumi]

You're assuming the value of 50/50 is 5050, it's not, it's 50, it assumes it's a different integer after the slash.

So 5, 12, 50, 2001, 2011, that's in order of smallest to largest. Most modern sorting systems sort this way now, though ones used to go by individual integer as if they were 'letters' in the 'word', but as whole integers rather than individual digits.

[canadave]

No, I see what you're saying (I think you might've typed this last reply after I edited my post). I understand that the sort is "correct" based on the integer value. But a true alpha sort that treats numbers as text shouldn't do this. For instance, Windows still does not sort this way when sorting file names by name, as far as I'm aware (but correct me if I'm wrong).

[DJ_Izumi]

By default, Windows no longer sorts that way, not sure when it changed.



That said, you can revert it to the classic method.

http://www.askvg.com/how-to-disable-nume...-explorer/

I like this method myself. Especially if I get image sequences that don't put 0's at the first, so you have a comic book or something and page 2 is arranged to come after page 11, because it was numbered 2.jpg instead of 02.jpg.

Total guess since I'm not a dev but I imagine this method is inherited from the way Kodi has to sort episodes. You wouldn't want Episode 26 to come before episode 3, would you?

[canadave]

Interesting, thanks. I just checked iTunes, and iTunes sorts the way you're describing as well.

I don't know...that may be "how it's done now", but it just looks weird to me in the movie library to see it that way. I wonder if it could be made an option in Kodi, as it appears to be in Windows?

Your example of the image sequence, by the way, is an example where the integer value sort IS the best way to do it. But that's because the numbers in the image sequence are being treated as numbers, rather than text (as one would expect of a sequence). But that's not the case when sorting a movie library's titles, where numbers should be treated as text rather than as numbers (all IMHO of course).

[canadave]

Just saw your episode example. Yes, I agree, in that case, again, your sort method would be much preferred. But that's again because an episode list is a sequence of numbers, rather than the titles of episodes.

Maybe that's where Kodi's sort logic has arisen, but if that's the case, then I think movies and TV show episodes should have different sort methods, each appropriate to its own type.

[DJ_Izumi]

In the case of movies, you're probably right, it would look nicer to a person looking at their library to see '2 Guns' and '21 Jump Street' next to each other without '12 years a slave' in the middle, and the kinda of number sequences where this would be detrimental may not exist at all, but it's probably a rather low priority for the devs.

[canadave]

.... but it's probably a rather low priority for the devs.

I can readily agree with that

Anyway, just wanted to raise the issue and see if I was nuts or not. Thankfully, my sanity now reassured, I'll leave it up to the devs whether they want to bother with this or not.

[smeghead68]

I am going to resurrect this dead thread regarding sorting rather than create a new one as it might be related.
Currently I am running Kodi 14 on a Windows 7 machine. My home server is running Freenas 9.3.

I have some home videos that I store on the server and I have saved the video files in separate folders which are named by date, for example:
2010-18 - Europe vacation
2011-12 - Christmas
2012-10 - Halloween
2013-12 - Christmas

All of these have DVD file folders (eg Video_TS) and files (VOB). When viewing in Kodi the folders were sorted properly by year/month and everything was fine.....Until recently. My video camera died and now using the digital camera for video.


Recently I added some additional folders and each folder contains several (mix of) MP4 and AVI files
2013-12 - Chistmas part 2
2014-06 - summer vacation
2015-03 - spring break


Now, in Kodi, instead of seeing these new folders below the existing they appear above so the sort order shows:

2013-12 - Christmas part 2
2014-06 - summer vacation
2015-03 - spring break
2010-18 - Europe vacation
2011-12 - Christmas
2012-10 - Halloween
2013-12 - Christmas

This is rather annoying as I would expect the "2013-12 - Christmas part 2" to be below the "2013-12 - Christmas" folder. I have tried everything I could think of to fix the sort order but nothing has worked.

Any way to fix this?