[lcg_]

Hello,

I am experiencing a minor problem with the sort order of my movies and the "ignorie articles" setting:
Typically, I want Kodi to ignore articles such as "the" when sorting. This feature works fine, except for a handful of films. The problem is that "die" is the female definite article in German and therefore the movie "Die Hard" (and its sequels) is sorted as "Hard, Die". I know that I can add more articles to ignore in Advancedsettings.xml, but I don't need more, I need less.

I was wondering ...
1) if this is a problem only on my machine because the OS is installed in German or if this also occurs for users with other locales?
2) if there is a setting to *not* ignore the article for a few individual movies without changing the setting globally?
3) if I could also remove "die" from the list of articles? For the time being, this would also solve my problem because I do not have any German movie titles starting with "Die ...".

I couldn't find any solution in the documentation or on Google, however, all the search terms I can think of give me a lot of generic results. I already modified the sort title for the "Die Hard" films to be simply "Die Hard 1", "Die Hard 2", "Die Hard 3", so they would sort in the correct order from 1 to 3. Yet they are still sorted in my collection as "Hard, Die ..." relative to the other movies. Therefore I know it's not something as simple as overriding the sort title. It seems to me that the "ignore articles" settings is applied on top of whatever a movie's sort title is.

Cheers,
Lars

[pkscout]

I think Kodi is getting confused because you're using multiple languages. One thing you might consider is to change the movie scraper preferences to use your local language (German in your case I believe). Assuming there is a German translation for Die Hard (I can't change my language prefs without creating an account, so I can't check), you would get that in your library instead, and that should avoid the German article issue.

BTW, you can change the language settings for the movie scraper by editing the source, clicking OK to keep the name, and then look for the settings option just under the scraper name.

[lcg_]

Hi,

Thanks for your suggestion, I had not considered that this could be a side effect of using Kodi in German with the scrapers set to English.

Technically, switching the scraper to German would fix the problem for "Die Hard" since the German title is "Stirb langsam". However, that's not an option for me: I don't really like German dubbings of English/American films and TV series, I prefer the original audio and the original title. That's why I stopped including the German audio track when ripping my discs at some point. I was never watching the dubbed version anyway and it was just using up harddisk space. If I switched the scraper language, I would have hundreds of movies with only the original English audio track but the German title. My OCD brain cannot handle that. (Don't even get me started on the awesome idea of replacing one English title with another English title for a movie's release in Germany. I mean why?? Either translate it or leave the original, but what's the point of a different English title for a German audience??)

I haven't looked at the code but from what I could observe the current implementation works something like this:
When scraping, it finds the title and sort title for an entry. Then, when the list is sorted by title, the "ignore articles" setting modifies the sort titles on the fly, thus the sort title "Die Hard 1" becomes "Hard 1, Die" and ends up next to "Hard Candy".
A simple solution for my problem (I am still not sure if this is only my problem, any English OS/Kodi users out there who have "Die Hard" in their library?) would be the following algorithm: During the initial scraping, the scraper looks up the title and then generates the sort title, taking into account the "ignore articles" setting. This sort title is then used as is to actually sort the list, just as the name implies. Thus, "Die Hard" has an initial sort title of "Hard, Die", which I could then edit/override with "Die Hard 1", having it in the order I want. Once the user overrides the sort title, the scraper would not touch it again under the assumption that the user had good reasons for the change. IMO, this behaviour is more consistent with what I would expect from a sort title ("this is how you need to sort this list, please don't try to be clever about it"). The downside of this is that it is a breaking change from the current behaviour: for all entries with articles at the beginning that are already in the database, the sort order would change since it would not modify the sort titles for existing entries (we do not know if the user edited it) and it is no longer doing it on the fly when sorting.

I am still hoping for a simple solution that I am missing, which could fix the order without having to change the implementation of either the scraper or the "ignore articles" setting.

Cheers,
Lars

[mkortstiege]

In case you're using the default scraper (the movie database), try enabling the "Keep original Title" option.

[hansl]

you could switch Kodi's language to English, couldn't you? In that case Kodi wouldn't recognize "Die" as the grammatical article and not sort it accordingly, that would only apply to English articles. The only downside is that you'd have a Kodi with "Settings" instead of "Einstellungen"...

and I have to say that I cannot understand your aversion against the great translations of movie titles in Germany. "The good, the Bad and the Ugly" can only be translated to the German title "Zwei glorreiche Halunken" (= "Two glorious scoundrels"), that's a word by word translation

[Fergus]

Have you tried using .nfo files for the offending movies, and using a "sorttitle" attribute?

http://kodi.wiki/view/NFO_files/movies

If the "ignore article" logic is applied to the sorttitle attribute (I'm not sure if it is), you could cheat by using a sorttitle of 'Die Die Hard'?

[pkscout]

Have you tried using .nfo files for the offending movies, and using a "sorttitle" attribute?

http://kodi.wiki/view/NFO_files/movies

If the "ignore article" logic is applied to the sorttitle attribute (I'm not sure if it is), you could cheat by using a sorttitle of 'Die Die Hard'?

Ooooh. That's a good idea. I do something similar with all the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. I have a .nfo file that defines a custom set and then a sort title that orders them based on this:

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/marvel-cinem...-avengers/

[lcg_]

you could switch Kodi's language to English, couldn't you? In that case Kodi wouldn't recognize "Die" as the grammatical article and not sort it accordingly, that would only apply to English articles. The only downside is that you'd have a Kodi with "Settings" instead of "Einstellungen"...

Switching Kodi to English sorts "Die Hard" properly next to other movies starting with "D". I'd like to keep it in German if possible since the rest of the OS is in German.

Interestingly, though, while it's set to German, it seems to recognize both "Die" as well as "The" as articles. Especially TV series starting with "The" were sorted as if the article wasn't there. That's why I didn't even try if switching Kodi's UI language has any effect on this.

Have you tried using .nfo files for the offending movies, and using a "sorttitle" attribute?

http://kodi.wiki/view/NFO_files/movies

If the "ignore article" logic is applied to the sorttitle attribute (I'm not sure if it is), you could cheat by using a sorttitle of 'Die Die Hard'?

Thanks! This worked, but I didn't have to resort to using an XML file. I just edited the sort title (which I had already done, so the 3 parts of "Die Hard" sorted properly) and added another "Die" at the beginning, which could then be ignored as an article.


Adding another article works well enough as a workaround for my purpose. Yet, I am still not sure if this should be made user-visible and editable since Kodi already has support for a sort title. That is, a movie such as "The Hangover" gets a sort title of "Hangover, The" if the "ignore articles" setting is active and a user can freely edit this string. For example, they could then simplify the sort titles of the 3 parts as "Hangover 1", "Hangover 2" and "Hangover 3". What do you think?

Cheers and thanks for all your suggestions,
Lars