[harlequin80]

As far as I am concerned the only real thing missing from XBMC / KODI at the moment is an effective system of parental controls that is wife friendly. I am aware of using different shares, profiles, and directories but that method fits very poorly with my usage case. Not least of which is that I have managed to maintain our watched history for over 5 years and losing that would cause serious wife anger.

On top of this I have a distributed setup with xbmc on 4 devices talking back to a centralised mysql box. I don't want to have the additional complexity of needing different profiles accessed differently on each machine. None of the front ends have keyboards attached and they work purely off microsoft remotes so the simpler and less button pushy the better.

What I would ideally like is to have the ability to have different content accessible after entering a pin. So no pin is all content I have deemed is kid friendly, pin of 1234 is 12 yr old friendly pin 6666 gets me everything. To me this would be accessed by pushing a button on the remote while in Library mode - selecting enter pin - and then on entering the right number the suitable library opening. The library would then time out and revert to "SAFE" after a period of time. It would also mean that directly accessing files via the Video tab would require a pin.

I know that this has been requested many times before. And I know that the attitude has been to use the profiles. However profiles require me to have a different sorting structure to current, lose my current library and watch status and don't have a safety fall back if I forget to log out.

I would be willing as well to contribute to a bounty if that will help this move forward.

Thanks

[spcano01]

Bounties, nice!!! I would contribute as well, however, this thread seems to be the solve for this and many other sweet things in a distributed deployment.


http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid1848796

[DJ_Izumi]

The first hurdle here would be finding the rating data in the first place. The age rating info for TV series doesn't seem to be stored on any of the online databases. With out that, there's nothing that could be done to start with.

[harlequin80]

I'm not asking for the system to scrap ratings data. Though I guess that would be nice from an automated perspective. What I want is to be able to go through and mark things as acceptable or not.

ie. My eldest LOVES my little pony and I am happy to let her have the remote to choose which episode of that she wants to watch. However in the TV shows main list she has NCIS, Murder Most Horrid and Neon Genesis Evangelion within a couple of rows of My little pony.

Movies are even worse. Directly above Toy Story there is Total Recall and below is Trainspotting. Mary Poppins goes to Mad Max. You get the picture.

What I would like to be able to do is sit down and go through every tv show and every movie and mark it on a scale of 1 - 5. 1 is unrestricted, 5 most restricted. Each level would be able to access the levels below. When you go into the library you put your pin in and it will unlock your level and below. So if I put in the level 3 code I can now view all level 1, 2 & 3 programs.

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Bounties, nice!!! I would contribute as well, however, this thread seems to be the solve for this and many other sweet things in a distributed deployment.


http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid1848796

I have tried to read that and it is going over my head. My setup has one machine running xbmcbuntu as the main server, all other front ends connect to its mysql server. Then on each machine I have symbolic linked the ~/.xbmc/Thumbnails directory to an nfs shared directory /Videos/.xbmc/Thumbnails in my case. Then on each machine the absolute path remains constant an nfs mount to /Videos under which I have DVD, TV, Music Videos, etc.

This way all the thumbnails are shared, and every machine shares the same library information. Scanning for new content can be done anywhere as can library cleans.

[Karnagious]

What I would like to be able to do is sit down and go through every tv show and every movie and mark it on a scale of 1 - 5. 1 is unrestricted, 5 most restricted. Each level would be able to access the levels below. When you go into the library you put your pin in and it will unlock your level and below. So if I put in the level 3 code I can now view all level 1, 2 & 3 programs.

NVM, reread OP.

[asm495]

I would quite happily pay for this feature too. Lots of us nerds have grown up and now have kids. 10 years ago I couldn't care less if Toy Story was next to Trainspotting. Now I do...

[trogggy]

If you can live without the PINs then playlists will give you what you want.
I don't have 'Movies' on my homescreen, I have kids films / family films / adult films. Easy to set up - I have 4 films folders on my HDD - Kids(bleurgh) / kids shared(kids films I/my wife won't grumble about watching) / our films (child-friendly)/ My films(not child-friendly). The Kids playlist points to the first 2 folders, 'Family' points to the middle 2, 'Adults' points to the last 2.
Same for TV - I have playlists on the homescreen for cartoons / documentaries / entertainment etc. My son knows what he can click (his playlists are mostly in a submenu under his name) - so far it's not been a problem. If it becomes one I'll set up profiles again (which I used to use but it's more hassle) with PINs.
I suppose if you could put a PIN on a playlist you'd get pretty much what you're asking for.
Of course if you mean you have a tv in a child's bedroom then just put the relevant playlists on their homescreen - job done. They're really easy to set up, the time is spent putting films / series in folders in the first place.

As for watched status, back it up!!! - 5 years would be a pain to lose.
129448 (thread)
After using that you can move stuff about, re-scan and watch lists are back to normal.

[harlequin80]

Correct me if I am missing something though - if I change the folder structure I will lose the watched status for anything in a new path. Correct? Whether I back it up or not?

I can have a look at playlists - though I have never used them. I use the default homescreen with videos, movies, tv, programmes etc on it.

I know I could force it easily enough by moving files around but I was hoping I could have it without having to break the existing interface or lose the history. I have sorted every movie into a set format of /Videos/DVD/Toy Story/Toy Story.mkv or /Videos/TV/My Little Pony/Season 1/My Little Pony S01E01 - Episode title.mkv already and have a little over 1000 movies and 600 tv series on the system. I really don't want to have to break that structure.

[trogggy]

Correct me if I am missing something though - if I change the folder structure I will lose the watched status for anything in a new path. Correct? Whether I back it up or not?

The addon I linked to saves watched states in an xml file. I just had a quick peek, here's a typical entry:

<movie lastplayed="2014-07-25 01:37:40" playcount="2" year="2013">White House Down</movie>

ie not linked to location in any way.
There are other ways - eg exporting your library to each individual movie folder - to do the same thing. Moving sources doesn't have to be a problem for watched state.

Personally I'd break the structure - well obviously, that's what I did. It's a one-time pain in the neck but you don't have to lose your current watch lists etc. Now if I add a film I just have to decide who's going to watch it, chuck it in the appropriate folder and update my library.

You can set up a playlist in various ways btw - add a tag or custom genre for each film and point to that for instance. Whatever you do will involve initial work in categorizing. I went with path (ie separate folders) because it's easy to add another film now without having to mess about.
Just a suggestion, it's the easiest way I could come up with when I was facing the same issue.

[harlequin80]

Hmmm ok. This might be an option for the near term where I am more concerned by accidentally playing something unsuitable rather than seeking it out.

I'd probably do it slightly differently to your setup in that I would always include all movies in the top list just because I hate not having a complete list.

Still willing to contribute though to get my original idea written in. I don't have the capability unfortunately otherwise I would do it myself.

[FrankMM]

If it is of any help I had the need to apply a pin to movies etc so the grandchildren could only access the childrens movies and I wrote an add-on called pincontrol based on another script I had seen. It uses tags to decide if a pin number is needed when play is selected.and caters for different pins for different tags so we have #PG13#, #X# as examples to cater for different age limits. We simply apply tags when we load new library items. It has config setting that allows the pins to be updated as you would expect with an add-on. It may not be the most elegant code but functionally it has allowed us to have parental control from version 12 XBMC through to current Gotham 13. I am happy to post it somewhere if it is of any interest.

[bry]

If it is of any help I had the need to apply a pin to movies etc so the grandchildren could only access the childrens movies and I wrote an add-on called pincontrol based on another script I had seen. It uses tags to decide if a pin number is needed when play is selected.and caters for different pins for different tags so we have #PG13#, #X# as examples to cater for different age limits. We simply apply tags when we load new library items. It has config setting that allows the pins to be updated as you would expect with an add-on. It may not be the most elegant code but functionally it has allowed us to have parental control from version 12 XBMC through to current Gotham 13. I am happy to post it somewhere if it is of any interest.

@FrankMM that sounds great. Maybe use the content rating to automate the use of pin control?

[FrankMM]

I started by looking at content rating but was not seeing that I could get a consistent way of blocking what was needed but maybe that was just me looking in the wrong place, in the end I chose the route of identifying for myself what was needed to be blocked and went the route of tagging things for myself. I am sure someone could take the code and make something better of it. For now it gives us the level of control we needed and still allows us to encourage the children to use XBMC, which we wanted as it is the ideal media centre for the whole family here.

[harlequin80]

If it is of any help I had the need to apply a pin to movies etc so the grandchildren could only access the childrens movies and I wrote an add-on called pincontrol based on another script I had seen. It uses tags to decide if a pin number is needed when play is selected.and caters for different pins for different tags so we have #PG13#, #X# as examples to cater for different age limits. We simply apply tags when we load new library items. It has config setting that allows the pins to be updated as you would expect with an add-on. It may not be the most elegant code but functionally it has allowed us to have parental control from version 12 XBMC through to current Gotham 13. I am happy to post it somewhere if it is of any interest.

This would be fantastic! Essentially this does a large part of what I was looking for. Can if be extended to TV shows as well?

From there the only improvement would be if library items were not visible without a code but I appreciate that would be a lot harder to achieve.

[Karnagious]

If it is of any help I had the need to apply a pin to movies etc so the grandchildren could only access the childrens movies and I wrote an add-on called pincontrol based on another script I had seen. It uses tags to decide if a pin number is needed when play is selected.and caters for different pins for different tags so we have #PG13#, #X# as examples to cater for different age limits. We simply apply tags when we load new library items. It has config setting that allows the pins to be updated as you would expect with an add-on. It may not be the most elegant code but functionally it has allowed us to have parental control from version 12 XBMC through to current Gotham 13. I am happy to post it somewhere if it is of any interest.

IMO that addon should be in the official repository.

If you want help with that, let me know. I intend to use the addon myself in a year or two.