Kodi Community Forum

Hello

I've recently discovered the possibility of using tags for movies. I'm currently sorting out my library to better filter certain movies and wondered if I should use custom genres or tags to do so, and what are the benefits using one over the other (if any)?

For example I have a lot of stand-up comedy, the majority of which are already part of that comedians set, and part of 'Comedy' genre by default scrape info. I would like to group all stand-up comedy together, so I could create a customer genre, or add tag, but which to choose and why? I'm leaning towards custom genre as this is easily accessible via library, and present when viewing all other genres, which is something I often use to browse and select a movie to watch.

I understand if I was to use a tag, I could create a smartplay list and filter that way, but I've never really used a smartplay list, so not too familiar with them. It seems to me, if I was to use tag/smartplay list in this way, and perhaps add link to main menu via a custom skin, this group would be separated from my usual browsing habits (via movie library). As such is there a way to include 'Smartplay Lists' in with the 'Videos > Movies' view so I'd have something like this...

Genres
Title
Year
Actors
Directors
Smartplay lists
Studios...

Also with regards to creating tags, what do you guys do? Do you scrape from Tmdb using Universal Movie Scrape, or simply create your own as and when needed? I started to scrape from Tmdb, but already I feel a lot of the tags would not be useful to me personally, and often there are far too many scraped. It would be great if it was possible to set UMS to use a limited number of tags, and to use only the most popular ones, ie 'weighted' tags. Weighted in the sense that many different uses have selected the same tag like for example on LastFM for music, although I don't think weighted tags is actually supported on Tmdb, so all tags are currently equal (will have to check).

What's your thoughts please? Do you perfect to create custom genre's or do you take the tag/smartplay list route?

Thank you

That's possible. Basically you want to edit video nodes (wiki), which is now a lot easier because someone made an add-on to do it.

I like tags because it's easier to control from within the XBMC/Kodi GUI.

Thank you. Is it possible to create nodes for smartplay lists though, as in the wiki example, it's created for actual movies which have an actual location, where as smartplay list is, well, just a list, of which I have no idea where it resides? Do you have a link to the add-on please?

Anyone any other thoughts on this subject please?

While time consuming initially (at least it was for me with over 2600 movies), I went through and edited/changed/adjusted all the Movie Genre's to make things easier to find within XBMC/Kodi.

I use the MediaElch progam (which is simple to use, and allows you to create custom Genre's). You can read about it here...http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=136333

For example, I created a custom Genre called Martial Arts, and assigned all my Karate, Kung Fu, etc movies with this Genre.Likewise I did the same with Super Heroes, and Children.

Then in the Skin ACE, I created a Main Menu item called Cartoons, and have it display all the shows with the Children Genre.

Hope this gives you some ideas to try out.

Thanks Powerhouse. I think this is what I will do with genre's myself, although like Ned Scott said, I do like the easy of using and creating new tags within Kodi itself.

Currently trying to sort my movie library out, so I've been checking out various media managers recently. Heard good things about MediaElch, so just had a quick look, and looks great, although have to say my currently favourite is 'Media Companion'. It too can add custom genre's, tags, and pretty much anything else you would need! It has a plethora of options so you can set up scraping in the EXACT way required. It's a little daunting on first use with so many options compared to something like MediaElch, but has excellent online docs, and the developer is always around to answer questions. It almost sounds like that developer is me, plugging my own stuff over another, but I can assure you it's not (I wish I was that smart!), but just happy to have found this software as I haven't really gotten on well with the others I've tried in the past. Until now I've just let XBMC do the scraping, but as library grows, had to find something external to manager scrape errors etc.

Anyways, getting back on topic, so do you not use tags at all then? I guess they could be used in addition to genre's, like for example tagging your favourite movies 'Awesome!' (or just 'favourites' if you're not an old kid like me), which would allow for further filtering. To be honest, if I was to set up genre's like you have, I doubt I would then use the tags at all.

Keep it coming people. What do you use, custom genres, tags, or both?

(2014-11-25, 19:54)jackhulk Wrote: [ -> ]Thank you. Is it possible to create nodes for smartplay lists though, as in the wiki example, it's created for actual movies which have an actual location, where as smartplay list is, well, just a list, of which I have no idea where it resides? Do you have a link to the add-on please?

Anyone any other thoughts on this subject please?

The add-on is under XBMC.org add-on repo -> Programs -> Video Node Editor

Playlist lists can be shown like this: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master...ylists.xml

or, if you'd like, you can just download this pre-made collection of nodes that I copied just now: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2340692/video.zip

Expand that and put the "video" folder in your userdata folder under "library".

Brilliant, thanks Ned!

In deciding where exactly to put this, I found two 'userdata' locations. Do you know why Kodi has two? One in the installation folder e.g...

Program Files (x86)\Kodi\system\library\video

..and of course the other in AppData\Roaming\Kodi\userdata\library\video. Copying your pre-made one works in both locations, just wondered why there is two locations with seemly duplicate files? BTW AppData......\library was empty. This is where I've put it for now as that's the folder I backup anyways.

Use AppData. The other one will get overwritten during upgrades.

Ok thank you.