[Stoofer]

I'm not sure if this is the intended way it's supposed to work or not but if I create a Movie Set then the <sorttitle> Field for that Set is always populated by the movies in that Set in date order i.e the oldest dated movie is the first entry, the newest the last. My quesion is is there any way to populate this Set in alphabetical order instead? I know I can change the order manually inside TMM to achieve this but I have Sets with a lot of movies in them that I want to display alphabetically in Kodi by name and moving them one at a time up and down the list would take ages. Since Kodi uses the <sorttitle> field as the basis for its 'Sort by Title' functions this means that at present it doesn't matter whether you choose the Title or Date sort criteria in Kodi the results are displayed exacty the same (bar a small shuffling for movies that share the same date.)

At present the only way I can get Kodi to correctly display a movie Set created by TMM in alphabetical order is is to manually remove the <sorttitle> field completely from each NFO file and let the program decide on the order rather than have it forced upon it. I know how important this field is to some people so I don't want to see an option for it to be removed but could there be some other way to generate the sort title other than by date? Alternatively could the <sorttitle> field contain just a number rather than the Set Name and a number since the Set Name is already present in the <set> field?

Thanks.

[mlaggner]

Hi,

I know the handling with movie sets in Kodi is not optimal. They do use the field <set> in the NFO, but for sorting they use the <sorttitle> too.
Unfortunately (according to the tests done when I've developed it) Kodi sorts the titles from one movie set independent of the content of the <set> tag;

e.g. If you have the movie set "Harry Potter Collection" the <set> would contain "Harry Potter Collection". When I now fill in 01 / 02.. in the sort title, Kodi would display the movies at the beginning of the list, because the sorttitle starts with a number..

second one: the movie sets is designed for exactly one reason: to manage sets like the "Harry Potter Collection" (which do have some meta data like a poster, plot, ..). Every set has a historical order (and thus we need to use the sorttitle to force another sort order than the alphabetical one..)

Reading your requirement I'd suggest you to work with tags! Tag all your movies you'd like to group with the same tag (e.g. PIXAR movies) and you have several advantages
a) all your movies are still in alphabetical order
b) you can filter by tags nicely in Kodi (and tmm!)
c) the resulting sort title (is not being used with tags) does not mess up the order in kodi
d) you tag have multiple tags per movie! (e.g. PIXAR movie, Animation and Family)

hth
Manuel

[Stoofer]

Hi Manuel,

Thanks for the reply. I did think about using Tags specifically because I can have multiples per movie as you say but I think the use of them in Kodi is still quite primitive at the moment, that and I didn't fancy bulk editing the two thousand movies that I've already got! In the end I wrote a small program to recursively scan for NFO files and remove the <sorttitle> Tag from them automatically which works great and has restored my ability to display tmm generated NFO's in date order properly (by date I don't mean 'Date added' but 'Year', sorry for any confusion.) I have to run it if I make any changes via tmm as the program recreates the Tag in Sets but it only takes a few seconds to update a 1TB drive so it's not that bad and I'l see if I can automate the process a bit more.

Even though my collection is probably 95% sorted by Year (which Kodi does by default I believe) it's still handy to have the odd Set display in alphabetical order. I see the benefit of displaying series like the "Harry Potter Collection" and others based on the Year they were released but I'd rather have my "Video Nasties" in alphabetical order since I know exactly where to go to to find the film. I know I can use Search or Shift and quick typing to get to what I want but on an Android box it's sometimes easier (lazier?) to go with cursor control instead of a keyboard!

Cheers!

Bob

[Stoofer]

Hi Studded,

Sorry I can't reply to your PM, the board won't let me send PMs or emails until I've made more posts and been on here longer. Can you email me instead and I'll forward the program on to you via that. Sorry about this.

Bob

[Studded]

Thanks Bob. sent an email.