2010-10-29, 19:17
CAVEAT LECTOR: I'm a relatively new user but starting to feel ambitious (maybe too ambitious?)
Let me start by saying, yes, I am fully aware that this topic has been discussed repeatedly all over the forums. I'm not asking anyone to change the way XBMC works or even to mod a skin for me. I think I have a solution that will work for my needs but it'll be a fair amount of work and I wanted to bounce it off people to find out if I'm approaching this the right way or if I need to rethink it all before I spend a huge amount of time going this route.
First, a little background...my video collection contains:
* Regular Movies (e.g. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone)
* Regular TV Shows (e.g. Fringe)
* Documentaries (both TV and Movie)
* Cartoon Shorts (e.g. Classic Warner Bros)
* Kid’s TV (e.g. Go, Diego, Go!)
* Kid’s Movies (e.g. Madagascar)
* Sports (e.g. Formula 1 Racing)
In each of these "categories" I have anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand videos. Yes, I realize this is nothing even remotely close to what other people have but I'm not other people... and I can be rather OCD when it comes to making things look and work the way I want them to look and work
With a few exceptions (test cases) only regular Movies and TV Shows are part of my XBMC library, the rest are in folders on my PC but I'd like to get them added to XBMC as well but not at the price of chaos.
I have three basic criteria for any approach that I consider:
What (little) I know:
From reading through the wiki and the forums, it seems there are two useful approaches I could take to get close to what I want: Profiles and Smart Playlists.
Profiles would get me something very close to objectives 1 and 2 especially if I set up a hot key to switch between profiles. Unfortunately it doesn't give me objective 3 (unless I'm missing something) and it's really not a particularly elegant solution in the sense that it doesn't feel natural to me.
So that leaves me with Smart Playlists. I've done a little experimenting and determined that if I create the following smart playlists:
My plan is to do something like this:
(only looking at documentaries here but the principle applies to the rest)
First, hand-roll nfo files for each documentary
Well, technically I have a spreadsheet that semi-automates it. I'm creating them all as movies even if they were on TV since almost all were one-shots anyway. Those few that are series will be incorporated into sets.
Second, create a Smart Playlist for each sub-genre
For example, my science documentaries will have a genre of 'DOC: Science', history will be under 'DOC: History' and so on. Note that I'm planning to use the prefix 'DOC:' to ensure these genres group together when viewed in "normal" mode. These playlists should be accessible via Video>Playlists although ideally I'd like some sort of "folder" to hold them in on the home screen but I can live with this if I can't find a skin that lets me add a folder with specific playlists in it.
So, finally we reach my questions:
Am I going about this all wrong? Is there a better solution that I'm just not seeing? Is there a particular skin or skin mod or add-on or whatever that would make this any easier or cleaner?
thanks
Let me start by saying, yes, I am fully aware that this topic has been discussed repeatedly all over the forums. I'm not asking anyone to change the way XBMC works or even to mod a skin for me. I think I have a solution that will work for my needs but it'll be a fair amount of work and I wanted to bounce it off people to find out if I'm approaching this the right way or if I need to rethink it all before I spend a huge amount of time going this route.
First, a little background...my video collection contains:
* Regular Movies (e.g. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone)
* Regular TV Shows (e.g. Fringe)
* Documentaries (both TV and Movie)
* Cartoon Shorts (e.g. Classic Warner Bros)
* Kid’s TV (e.g. Go, Diego, Go!)
* Kid’s Movies (e.g. Madagascar)
* Sports (e.g. Formula 1 Racing)
In each of these "categories" I have anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand videos. Yes, I realize this is nothing even remotely close to what other people have but I'm not other people... and I can be rather OCD when it comes to making things look and work the way I want them to look and work
With a few exceptions (test cases) only regular Movies and TV Shows are part of my XBMC library, the rest are in folders on my PC but I'd like to get them added to XBMC as well but not at the price of chaos.
I have three basic criteria for any approach that I consider:
- It should allow me to have a section on the main screen for Movies, TV Shows, Documentaries, Cartoon Shorts, Kid's, and Sports.
- Once I select any of these main categories it should present me with the option to either further narrow my criteria (e.g. by genre, year, etc) or to flip through the full selection of posters. Basically I want them to work just like Movies and TV Shows in the "normal" setup.
- And I want to be able to queue items from each category together for an evening of uninterrupted viewing. So I should be able to queue up a couple of Cartoon Shorts followed by a Documentary and then a regular movie.
What (little) I know:
From reading through the wiki and the forums, it seems there are two useful approaches I could take to get close to what I want: Profiles and Smart Playlists.
Profiles would get me something very close to objectives 1 and 2 especially if I set up a hot key to switch between profiles. Unfortunately it doesn't give me objective 3 (unless I'm missing something) and it's really not a particularly elegant solution in the sense that it doesn't feel natural to me.
So that leaves me with Smart Playlists. I've done a little experimenting and determined that if I create the following smart playlists:
- Documentary TV (type=tv, genre starts with 'DOC')
- Documentary Movie (type=movie, genre starts with 'DOC')
- Sports (type=tv, genre="Sports")
- Cartoon Shorts (type=movie, genre="Cartoon Short")
- Kid's TV (type=tv, genre="Children")
- Kid's Movie (type=tv, genre="Children")
- Regular TV (type=tv, playlist is not any of 1-6)
- Regular Movies (type=movie, playlists is not any of 1-6)
My plan is to do something like this:
(only looking at documentaries here but the principle applies to the rest)
First, hand-roll nfo files for each documentary
Well, technically I have a spreadsheet that semi-automates it. I'm creating them all as movies even if they were on TV since almost all were one-shots anyway. Those few that are series will be incorporated into sets.
Second, create a Smart Playlist for each sub-genre
For example, my science documentaries will have a genre of 'DOC: Science', history will be under 'DOC: History' and so on. Note that I'm planning to use the prefix 'DOC:' to ensure these genres group together when viewed in "normal" mode. These playlists should be accessible via Video>Playlists although ideally I'd like some sort of "folder" to hold them in on the home screen but I can live with this if I can't find a skin that lets me add a folder with specific playlists in it.
So, finally we reach my questions:
Am I going about this all wrong? Is there a better solution that I'm just not seeing? Is there a particular skin or skin mod or add-on or whatever that would make this any easier or cleaner?
thanks