[sol_xpert]

Dear XBMC

let me start with some facts,
XBMC is now used by all members of a family
- kids
- parents
- visitors
- young and old

it's there in the center of the living room on an HTPC of some sort
and linked to a Network attached storage of some sort with lots of Terabytes ( Synology NAS is great )
has access to thousands of Movies and tens of thousands of TV show episodes

now , someone wants to watch a movie
has to scroll through all those movies to find a certain cartoon for the kids !
or an action movie to watch with the guys !

filter by genre is good but it would bring old and new movies !
still no cartoon genre !

my point ,

search should be better , user should be able to combine filters
years + genre + actor ... for example

also an idea , similar to movie sets , of sort , it lets you group several movies by locations on the drive

example :

\\xbmc\
\\xbmc\movies
\\xbmc\tvshows
\\xbmc\movies\action\mov 1
\\xbmc\movies\cartoon\mov 2
\\xbmc\movies\mov 3
\\xbmc\movies\mov 4
\\xbmc\movies\mov ... n

when user selects movies you see mov 1 to n
also possible to select movies by root folders under movies

so when user selects movies , you see
[ Action ] ... [ Cartoon ] ... [ Others ]

this will display a subset to scroll through and use filters on
same goes for TV series, categories them by root folder name

also possible to include a password/pin code to view contents of certain folders
if they contain movies not suitable for kids for example

navigating and access content should be enhanced
it's not a problems for someone with a small library
but when your NAS has 24 TB of content , you need to have better search and access control

thank you in advance

[mikebzh44]

Or you can use smart playlist to separate contents and use a skin with custom menus.

That what I did to separate Parents movies from Children movies from Animated.

[Martijn]

Smart_playlists (wiki)

[sol_xpert]

XPS / smart playlist is good but does not solve the problem

what i mean , it's easy to go through all those movie folders ( 1 mov per folder )
cut and paste the cartoon movie folders in a folder named CARTOON
which will directly translate to a category that users can select similar to the MOVIES category

physical order that needs no xml code to maintain
and the old MOVIES category still has all content just the same

thank you

[Martijn]

you do not need to maintain anything.
set smartplaylist to filter out the CARTOON folder and you are done.
it DOES solve the problem as it's a dynamic filter. so when you add a new movie in that folder it will just get displayed without you changing anything.
only thing that is not easy possible in Confluence is adding a main menu button for it. However most other skins do support this.

[mikebzh44]

As Martijn explain it. smart playlists are dynamics filters. As long as your library is updated (manually or automatically) and cleaned (to remove old entries), you can move a movie from one folder to another (from MOVIES to CARTOONS for example) and your movie will automatically be displayed in your CARTOONS menu based on CARTOONS smart playlist.