[sho]

v12.0 (Frodo) has full library customization
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Custom_video_nodes

[Mihara]

v12.0 (Frodo) has full library customization
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Custom_video_nodes

This solution is for a very different problem. From what I read in the wiki, it is eminently suitable to split the library into "Anime" and "Regular TV shows", for example. This is not going to help with the problem discussed in this topic.

Imagine my specific situation. I have on the order of 700 anime titles - all of them TV shows, or treated as such. Of these, well over half belong to one group or another of directly or indirectly related titles, i.e. shows that are not, strictly speaking, seasons of each other, but should be grouped anyway, totalling over 300 groups.

How would you, using custom video nodes, create such container items, which would show on the same library level as other, singleton anime TV shows?

[Martijn]

Use 'tags' to tag those and then use the library nodes

[Ned Scott]

Martijn, he's saying something like this:

let's say I have 5 shows

Bob goes to the park
Tentacle Monsters: The Animation
Tentacle Monsters: The College Years
I like Hot Dogs
Where is my Hat

He wants to view the shows in the GUI where both "Tentacle Monsters" are grouped together, like you would see with movie sets, along with the other shows.


Tags would provide the foundation for this, but I'm not sure if it's something that's possible for skinners without additional support?

[dragonflight]

Not trying to hijack this thread, but this is the sort of thing I was thinking about with my suggestion of using playlists as virtual folders (see post http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=143530) but I got no response - probably used a bad title and perhaps a little terse, but I was trying to get some ideas and what someone might be willing to use them.

Right now (well Frodo) there are playlists that expand inline and there are library nodes which expand into a new directory always.
What I'm thinking of is a mix of the two so that one can do exactly what Ned Scott is suggesting.

@Mihara I'm not sure why tags would not work. Are you saying it's too much work to create a tag for each group/set you want to create - I would think that was exactly the same as creating a set), or are you saying that once you have the tags you don't know what to do with them - either playlists or library nodes?

I have a relatively simple bash (linux) script that creates the playlists for me to duplicate a file structure so the library looks like the file structure (i.e. folders (i.e. playlists) and files (i.e. Movies, TV show and even a mix), considering the time I have spent just trying to them imported and scraped in the library creating the 30 or so playlists by hand wouldn't have been out of the question.
I don't believe creating playlists for each of the "groups" you would like would be any harder that creating sets, probably easier since it is all in the same file.

I'm eager to get traction for this idea as I have 3000 movies 150 tv shows and 8000 episodes so far in my library and I have another 5 or 6 TB of stuff left to add so I have hundreds of library pages

Anyway if your interested have a think about how it might work for you or what you really want to get out of these groups

mike

[Mihara]

@Mihara I'm not sure why tags would not work. Are you saying it's too much work to create a tag for each group/set you want to create - I would think that was exactly the same as creating a set), or are you saying that once you have the tags you don't know what to do with them - either playlists or library nodes?

I got distracted from messing with XBMC and could not reply sooner, but, for what it's worth:

The problem I foresee with using custom video nodes for organizing series is not that I would have to manually assign groups or white a script to do that. I would have to do this anyway, as scrapers currently cannot possibly do this automatically, and if a feature were implemented, I would have to do this manually anyway up until they scrapers and the databases caught up, which would take ages.

The problems are actually these:

1. The documentation on custom video nodes does not detail if it is possible to have custom video nodes inline with singleton entries, but from what it says, it appears that it is not.
   
2. So far, on Frodo RC3, I have been unable to make any custom nodes work at all, even when I directly copied the example in the wiki. I either get a 'path does not exist' error, or absolutely no reaction to opening a custom node, even though the playlist rule I wrote works perfectly fine in a playlist. The logs report a failure, but regardless of the state of debugging mode, they don't tell me anything at all about what's actually wrong with my xml files.
   

To make it more clear what I need to get here's an example directory tree:

Code:

* Anime -- top level menu item.
|-- Genres, Actors, etc, as you currently have.
|-- Titles view.
-----|-- Anime Series 1, a singleton.
-----|-- Anime Series 2, a singleton again.
-----|-- Anime Series Group, containing multiple entries.
---------|---- Anime Series 3, a prequel to series 4 which is ongoing.
---------|---- Anime Series 4, which came out three years ago.
---------|---- Anime Movie 1, set in the same universe but not a sequel to either 3 or 4.
-----|-- Anime Series N...

I.e. something functionally equivalent to movie sets, but for TV series. The documentation on custom nodes is currently very much lacking, and trying to scrape my way through the sources does not prove very enlightening. If anyone could explain to me how could I possibly achieve such a structure using custom video nodes, I would be very much obliged.

[alspoll]

+100 to the ability to group multiple tv series into sets.

[newoski]

+101

[Vaikin]

Use 'tags' to tag those and then use the library nodes

This does not work for tv shows.

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<node order="11" type="filter">
  <label>Stargate</label>
  <icon>DefaultMovieTitle.png</icon>
  <content>tvshows</content>
  <match>all</match>
  <rule field="tag" operator="is">
        <value>Stargate</value>
  </rule>
  <order direction="ascending">sorttitle</order>
</node>

But this does, for movies.

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<node order="11" type="filter">
  <label>Harry</label>
  <icon>DefaultMovieTitle.png</icon>
  <content>movies</content>
  <match>all</match>
  <rule field="tag" operator="is">
        <value>HarryPotter</value>
  </rule>
  <order direction="ascending">sorttitle</order>
</node>

Any time using tags for tv shows it ends up just listing every tv show and not just the tagged ones.

[lost89577]

i like tags but when dealing with smartlists it does not group sets

Dragonflight i do know what you are going through, my collection 3000+ movies, 300+ tv shows (20,000+ eps), 500+ anime (i lost half when my raid card died, over 1tb of unwatched lost. 6 years later i am still pissed off over it)

[alspoll]

I have a terrible idea...

create a tag for the tv series name and then use votes to order all the episodes.

it won't show the individual series or group them by series, but it could have all the episodes in order...

ie, Gundam vote 1, Gundam vote 2...... Gundam (next tv series) vote 54.....

[Mihara]

I have a terrible idea...

create a tag for the tv series name and then use votes to order all the episodes.

it won't show the individual series or group them by series, but it could have all the episodes in order...

ie, Gundam vote 1, Gundam vote 2...... Gundam (next tv series) vote 54.....

You can get the same result by using per-series NFO files, which I found to be a good idea on it's own since it greatly simplifies maintenance -- you don't have to manually do anything if you end up having to rename files or rearrange directories yet again.

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?><tvshow><sorttitle clear="true">Nasuverse 1</sorttitle></tvshow>
http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=anime&aid=4932

This groups series together in a sensible order, but it doesn't collapse grouped series into subfolders, which is what I'd like to see, and I still don't see a way to do that with custom video nodes.

[alspoll]

I knew it was a terrible idea.

Thanks for the info.

[alspoll]

quick question...

is only the first line necessary? What is the link for?

TIA,

AL

[Mihara]

is only the first line necessary? What is the link for?

See the wiki on NFO files for details, they're not very fully described but that's where I got that information from in the first place. Just for a quick breakdown: The file needs to be in the same directory as the episodes and named "tvshow.nfo". XML elements can be on a single line or on multiple lines, it doesn't matter.

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>

is the XML file header and is needed for the other XML elements to work correctly, but if you're just using the URL you don't need that header.

Code:

<tvshow></tvshow>

brackets the data structure of the tv show record.

Code:

<sorttitle clear="true">Nasuverse 1</sorttitle>

is telling the NFO file reader to change the "sorttitle" variable for this series, which is the version of the title actually used while sorting, and doesn't have to be the same as the title that gets displayed.

The URL is for the scraper, telling it where to go looking for the rest of the information about the series -- so when I rename or move the directory and tell XBMC to update library, it'll find the series correctly no matter what the directory name is or where it is now.