2020-04-17, 23:19
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?
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?
