2015-05-19, 05:46
Somehow the post above by jurialmunkey finally reminded me why I really never made much use of content type "episodes" and almost always use "tvshows" and/or "movies".
It's to do with the search function in several of my earlier addons and more recently my PBS and CBC addons. When doing a search, you never know what's going to come back. Many times I get back just a video and an image with little or no metadata to support content type decision other than the description alluding to whether it's an episode of a show or a movie. I know it's a playable video but have no reliable way of knowing if it's a movie or an episode, however the image has different aspect ratios depending on what's returned. I wasn't sure how to figure out what the aspect ratio of the image was from the image file (naming wasn't happening) so I just looked at them and decided that they looked better as posters and therefore choose either "movies or "tvshows" for the whole search container depending on what metadata was available.
I now know that this will screw up some skins. The saddest part of this story is that a couple of the addons need to use the search facility with a category or name set as the standard method to get content.
There are things like documentaries which have poster images but the meta-data reads like an episode of a show.
I only bring all this up because the more I think about cases, at least for my addons, it would be nice to be able to change the content type on ListItem level, rather than Container level. I don't know if that's a real pain in the rear elsewhere or not.
It's to do with the search function in several of my earlier addons and more recently my PBS and CBC addons. When doing a search, you never know what's going to come back. Many times I get back just a video and an image with little or no metadata to support content type decision other than the description alluding to whether it's an episode of a show or a movie. I know it's a playable video but have no reliable way of knowing if it's a movie or an episode, however the image has different aspect ratios depending on what's returned. I wasn't sure how to figure out what the aspect ratio of the image was from the image file (naming wasn't happening) so I just looked at them and decided that they looked better as posters and therefore choose either "movies or "tvshows" for the whole search container depending on what metadata was available.
I now know that this will screw up some skins. The saddest part of this story is that a couple of the addons need to use the search facility with a category or name set as the standard method to get content.
There are things like documentaries which have poster images but the meta-data reads like an episode of a show.
I only bring all this up because the more I think about cases, at least for my addons, it would be nice to be able to change the content type on ListItem level, rather than Container level. I don't know if that's a real pain in the rear elsewhere or not.
