[Daydream]

Let's talk about Music Videos (everything below assumes: Kodi 18.6, clean install, download all the skins from the official repo, no other add-ons but what the skins come with, combined)

I've been collecting music videos for decades now, and I have no plans to stop. What follows is my own opinion and while I may sound critical in some places, I only aim to shed some light on issues and maybe help frame the conversation in the right direction.

I have 3 problems when it comes to music videos and Kodi:

1) The metadata. 2) The classification. 3) The presentation.

1) The metadata (both descriptive and art) is lacking rather badly; source, methodology of retrieval, almost everything. There were/are some efforts being made but they are just barely scratching the surface, somewhere between "not enough" and "too often inaccurate". I find it interesting that we could build databases for 43675 types of art for movies, series and music, but not anything for music videos (I know of imvdb but I don't see a lot of talk here about it). It is what it is, maybe this is representative for the level of people's interest in music videos. For now it's a YOYO situation (you're on you're own). Bring your own damn metadata.

Regarding the current (and hopefully future) efforts to scrape metadata, I would like to submit some ideas:
- I'm not sure what the <Studio> tag does for Music videos. The most expensive music video ever made is not advertised as being made by a studio. There is no studio, exception maybe 1 in a million. There is a Director and that's it. A studio produces the record, the music title track, not the Music video.
- on the same page, the producer of the album/single track is not the Director of the Music Video (so careful when scraping Wiki; i.e. Britney Spears' '(You Drive Me) Crazy' was filmed by Nigel Dick, not by Rami)
- the cover/thumb/poster/fanart, whatever for a music video can't be, and shouldn't be a poster or, worse, the CD single cover. More on this further below.

2) The classification.
I see this in two parts. The first is something that may stem from a language barrier or some other type of logic that I can't penetrate. There are many skins where Music Videos are called Concerts. This can't be right. Concerts are something else, will always be considered Movies, and are successfully indexed as such with the current scrappers.

The second part is more complex. Quick detour - Kodi allows for 3 types of video material: Movies, TV series, Music Videos. Why just 3? It's a database. Why can't it have 235 types or 1000?
Because this brings me to a messy issue: WHAT is a music video? (don't worry, I read the wiki, the forums, and I do it every day for the more than a decade).

Well, ABBA - Dancing Queen is a music video.
(Which BTW, was filmed by Lasse Hallström, at Alexandra’s discotheque, in Stockholm. Maybe we should fix the example for the Music video in wiki, which is completely wrong and, strangely for an English forum, in French)

So, if ABBA - Dancing Queen is a music video, and that's all nice and good, somebody please tell me where am I going to add these in Kodi:

Within Temptation - 2008-01-15 - Stand My Ground - Live TMF Music Awards Belgium
Camila Cabello - 2019-09-20 - iHeartRadio Music Festival 2019
Mylene Farmer - 2009-06-14 - JT 20H on FR2HD
Garbage - 2007-07-23 - Absolute Garbage Documentary
Kylie Minogue - 2011-01-22 - Concert Promo
Taylor Swift - 2017-xx-xx - The Dance - 'Look What You Made Me Do' Behind the Scenes

They are, in order: a performance, a miniconcert, an interview, a documentary, a commercial, and a miscellaneous clip.
Aren't only 3 types of video categories too few? And I don't want to bring the issue of where do home videos, drone videos and any other type of videos get added in Kodi, cause that's for a separate discussion.

These videos can't be added together, in one view. One would never know what is going on.
In my opinion we need more granularity. More (default) categories, or subcategories. Right now the only saving grace is including tags in clips' nfos (and doing it consistently, by hand or with more complex batch automation, and never deviate), and filter by them with some needlessly complex smartlists (or nodes). And customizing every skin in every Kodi install to pinpoint to those custom elements. Way too difficult and time consuming. Room for improvement maybe?

Let's push forward. Most of those videos above have complete dates, not just year. Sometimes even true music videos (in recent times) have a documented release date. Where can we store and use those? Karellen gracefully suggested that we can use the <premiere> tag. That actually works! But is there any Kodi skin that displays it fully, other than Estuary? Can we filter or search anywhere by a full date? I couldn't find how.

3) The presentation.
What I'm expecting a skin to show for a music video: proper art (again, see below), description/plot (if including the videos listed above this can capture the 'where' some performances, etc happened), year (full date preferred if available), media file properties (with color flags), artist, clip name, watched status. The rest can be dealt with on the info screen.
This may come as a surprise but there are very few views, across all skins in Kodi 18 official repo that actually show music videos right.

Proper Art. Clips exists mainly in 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios and a skin should properly display a combination of such elements on any given page that displays art, with landscape thumbnails, without cropping savagely into them. I'm sure there are some ways to do this skin-wise, and the compromise may not be perfect, but it can be done. Right now, the status is a far cry from this, with a huge number of skins offering views for Music Video in poster style. I'm really curious where did this start, where did anybody see a music video having a poster cover, as in a vertical type of art??
A music video will always have a thumbnail, and that's going to be either 4:3 or 16:9. Misappropriating views from other types of media has no place here, it doesn't fit, makes views unwatchable.
And display the CD single cover art is wrong. We are talking a bout a video, and the art should describe the video, not the single track, which is a different type of media and gets its own entry in the music section.

Bonus note: there are quite a few skins that have MV views where a "Total time" is being displayed. Again, borrowing too much maybe from music views? (where an album's total time would be shown). Imagine what happens if I enter a music videos "Title" list, and Kodi has to compute the total time of 3000 vids (or whatever it computes...). One just stares at a frozen screen for a while. And the info computed is of no use, it's the total time of unrelated items (especially in light of my point 2) above).

Let's try some numbers.
There are just shy of 100 views available for Music videos in Kodi 18, across all skins from the official repo. More than 70 show things just wrong (expecting posters, or looking like a different type of media was expected, or choosing one view leads to another, etc). Some 12 views are plain, classic list views and I can't fault them cause they are just text and do the job intended. The rest are kind of OK but still miss the mark to some degree, and some 4-5 almost get it right.
To me, it looks like more often than not, Music Videos have been treated as an afterthought. Views built and tweaked for other types of media have been enabled for music videos using the criteria of "nothing explodes too badly here". It would be greatly appreciated if skiners show more love when it comes to the music videos section too.

If anybody made it this far, this is where the wall of text ends. Any thoughts?

[FXB78]

It is what it is, maybe this is representative for the level of people's interest in music videos.

Basically this. I never hear of Music Videos being mentioned in the forums, presumably because nobody really uses Kodi for watching Music Videos. If I wanted to watch a series of music videos I'd probably just setup a YouTube playlist and watch through the YouTube addon. I suspect that's what most other people do

[Karellen]

It is no secret that Music Videos needs a major overhaul, but I don't think that will happen for a long, long time, if ever at all.

There is just not enough interest nor popularity for Music Videos. Developers work on issues with a higher priority and don't want to devote time on features that the overwhelming majority of users will never use. And judging by the forum posts, very few members use Music Videos at all. For a while I was using it for Home Videos via nfo files.

Quick detour - Kodi allows for 3 types of video material: Movies, TV series, Music Videos. Why just 3? It's a database. Why can't it have 235 types or 1000?

And that is where Smart Playlists and Nodes come into play and what Kodi is all about. We provide the framework, you modify it to suit your needs. It is unreasonable to expect the developers to provide hundreds of "types" when you can do this yourself with the proper skin. Remember that Kodi is more for tinkerers and can never, ever satisfy every users needs.

[Daydream]

It is unreasonable to expect the developers to provide hundreds of "types" 

That is true. However there is an interdependence between Kodi and its database (structured as it is Movies-Series-MV), and skins.
The views in skins are made for those specific categories, and nothing else. The fact that some views work everywhere (say a list view) it's because they are the lowest common denominator. The more sophisticated a view is, the more specific it becomes, and the less usable for a category of media that it wasn't meant for. Hence hands are tide.

It doesn't give anybody pause that besides classic Movies and TV series, any other type of video material need a serious dose of work and luck to find a skin to show it right? There are skins out there who don't enable, say, the same views for Movies as a default category and a smartlist made of movies. By the time one gets to MVs, we're out in the wilderness.

I mean, I get your point, but I though necessary to make mine, even as vastly outnumbered minority.

[LongMan]

Some really good points there. You forgot the difficulty is navigating music videos from the remote apps. No grouping by artists just a long alphabetical list.
 

They are, in order: a performance, a miniconcert, an interview, a documentary, a commercial, and a miscellaneous clip.

The music album from which a music video is derived is of little interest to me. I use album to create different categories for the videos. Each artist has an 'album' for music videos, one for interviews, another for concerts  etc. Not ideal but it works for me. No one releases an album of music videos anyway. That's a carry over from the music library.

Just my 2ct

I am trying to find some reasonable classification for the Live Performances. Some are just one song, others a full set, another 3 or four songs (miniconcert sounds for this). What would be your suggestions?

Cheers,
LongMan

[Daydream]

There's a danger with appropriating an "unused" tag 'cause one never knows how things may turn up in the future. In Kodi land Music Videos do get tagged in Albums, and the default views imply that grouping by album is expected.

That being said, I kind of do the same thing... I obsessively tag everything with both the <genre> tag and my own <tag> entries (<tag>MV</tag>, <tag>Performance</tag> etc). Cause I just don't know what will pay off better in the future and I have some automations that do this.

Ref Live Performances... If an artist shows up on a show or something and sings 1-3 songs, it's a performances in my book. I'll leave the songs together in one file. If it's something that is starting to approach the half an hour mark, it's a miniconcert. If it gets closer to the 1h mark it becomes debatable if it's a miniconcert or a concert. A miniconcert is where the artist shown up for more than a couple of songs, but as part of a bigger event. A concert should be an event only about the artist in question; plus scrapable with a movie scraper, or at least extensive metadata should be available (dedicated poster cover, setlist etc)

The subliminal aspect with Live performances... if you shuffle them with a smartlist, can you take more than 3 songs from the same artist at the same event? So anything that's longer than that threshold (which may be subjective) should be something else.

[LongMan]

Miniconcert 15-30 mins. I like that.

How about festivals with full sets. Glastonbury, Summer Jam etc. It's not one artist but as said before a full set.

How about the one song performances at The Grammy, American Music Awards, BRIT Awards, IHeart Radio or Live Lounge etc.

[HeresJohnny]

Personally, I use the music video section in a broader sense. It shows documentaries about musicians and concerts (like "David Bowie - The story of Ziggy Stardust" or "Eric Clapton - Life in 12 bars"), or additional content often found on Blu-rays and DVDs. I'd love to see concerts and animated playlists from Blu-rays and DVDs included but there aren't even any databases for that...

[Daydream]

How about festivals with full sets. Glastonbury, Summer Jam etc. It's not one artist but as said before a full set.

How about the one song performances at The Grammy, American Music Awards, BRIT Awards, IHeart Radio or Live Lounge etc.

Grammy Awards, AMA, Brit awards - Performances (An artist sings 1, 2, 3 songs max)
IHeart Radio Festival - I stay with what I said previously. Halsey at iHeartRadio Music Festival 2019 it's 5 songs, ~22 min. It's a miniconcert.
Coldplay at Glastonbury in 2016 - it's 1h 51m, 21 songs if we count the encores and if I'm not mistaken it's part of their 'A Head Full Of Dreams' Tour. It's a concert.
 

Personally, I use the music video section in a broader sense. It shows documentaries about musicians and concerts (like "David Bowie - The story of Ziggy Stardust" or "Eric Clapton - Life in 12 bars"), or additional content often found on Blu-rays and DVDs. I'd love to see concerts and animated playlists from Blu-rays and DVDs included but there aren't even any databases for that...

I would argue that is not correct (and skiners calling MV's Concerts just complicated the issue). 'The story of Ziggy Stardust', 'Life in 12 bars' - those concerts are movies, will be successfully scraped as such by any movie scraper (they have imdb entries, etc), in Kodi or with 3rd party tools. They will be/can be tagged as Genre - Concert (add Documentary too to Genre, if you like) and a smartlist or node can be created in Kodi using the Genre, to separate them from the rest of the 'true' movies; then add this new smartlist/node 'Concert' as a menu item, on the main menu and you'll have a view of only real concerts. They are not Music Videos.

The problem is that you'll have to edit the default Movie node too, to exclude them, so they don't appear twice, together with real movies and on their own 'Concert' menu. That was why I was arguing that Kodi has too few default categories and subcategories, and a lot of playlists/node scaffolding needs to be built to force things to show right.

[scott967]

First, there are 4 video library types not 3 (forgot episodes).  Second, music videos are available as library nodes in both the music and videos windows.  Third, the option exists to create smart playlists with both songs and music videos.

The video library appears to have been designed so that the different types have their own tables, but the various columns have generic names (C01, C02 etc) so that the same query can be used across the tables (but the semantics are different which affects skinning).

From what I see, music videos are either studio-produced or live.  So the date the video was released or the date of performance has value, but in every case I've seen they are related to released music, so the date of the music release is also significant.

I don't know that musicvideos have any dedicated art?  The ones I have are mostly sold along with the music CD as combined  CD+DVD.  Some of  these show up in Musicbrainz under the release group for the Single/EP/Album.  These typically have unique cover art.  Musicbrainz provides a "music video for" relation to the "recording" of the song track.

But currently from use/skinning the biggest problem I have is that an "album" node is available but there is no way to provide any art or metadata for the album listitems.  From the code it looks like the intent is that it would work like the artist node, which gets art and metadata from the music artist.

There also is possible improvement in that the "mixed" playlist only works for songs and musicvideos.  There's no "group by" option, but you can sort by artist or album.  IMO there really needs to be group by artist and album options.

You can use advancedsettings to treat musicvideos as music (songs-based on filename extension) but my experience with this is that it doesn't work that well.  Also since there is now an option to read tags in mp4 and mkv videos, the ability that music has to read tags isn't as needed as before that change to videos was made.

In my Aeon MQ5 mod I am planning to add the new videoplayer(offset) labels in the home page "now playing next tracks" panel.  I'm also considering adding "cover" as a musicvideo arttype that is supported in the skin.

scott s.
.

[docwra]

Regarding the metadata, as a long time MVID collector myself, I spent a long time looking at music video metadata in the old days.

If you look at TADB for a single there is loads of stuff there:

https://www.theaudiodb.com/track/34575152

Things like: 3 Mvid screenshots, last.fm data, youtube stats, mvid director, studio production company, youtube link, user rating etc.

Not all of this is scraped into Kodi, but its ready and waiting if anyone wants to rejig the database and enhance the scraper. I'm happy to add any more metadata as well if wanted.

The classification is pretty simple for me, there are Mvids (single songs) and concerts (full live performances). You can use nodes or smart playlists to separate the live music vids or interviews, you just need the metadata to make sense.

Presentation is really up to the skinners, but I like the idea of cross referencing a mvid with an audio recording. That would be cool.