[shoefone]

How do you browse by actors in the iOS Kodi Remote? The feature is mentioned on the Kodi wiki.

Related, is there a way to browse by director / country / other in the app?

Apologies if there's an obvious answer for this, I took a look and didn't find anything.

[Buschel]

Actors:
You can enter movie details (just selecting a movie from the list of movies), then scroll down to the list of actors and click on one of them. Now the App will show all movies from your database with this actor. In KODIs API I see no way to simply get a list of actors of all movies and start fro there.

Directors:
Yes, something similar is possible. You go to "Global Search", pull down the list until the Search field becomes accessible and then enter the director's name. But the App does not provide a list of directors, you need to enter the name to the search field.

Country:
No, you cannot do this with the App.

Edit: Just took your question as a trigger to look into making actors searchable in global search as well. This already works locally, but I need to take a deeper look at the compatibility for older Kodi server versions, and for possible side effects.

[shoefone]

Thanks, I see that now. Also thanks for looking into adding actor-global-search and your work on this in general. It's appreciated; the remote through iphone is, so far, the best way I've found to interact with kodi.

I do have a feature request, or at least a feature suggestion. It would be good to have fields like actor, director, and country available to browse, similar to how genre is now. I'm not sure how it could be fit into the UI - if it was on the same screen as the Genre list, there would have to be some way to change what's listed; if they were on different screens, they would probably have to hide (or force other items to hide) under the hamburger menu. Still, it would be nice.

[Buschel]

Thanks for your feedback! If you are interested in an early glimpse at new features I suggest you install the TestFlight Beta Version (see this post).

It is in general possible to read the country and directors for movies. Creating the logic / UI you are looking for is possible, but deviates from Kodi server's available remote API functions -- it is e.g. not simply possible to read all directors or countries in a simple command and display such list. I am not sure I can make this work without too much hassle.
What is possible pretty quick is allowing to sort by director or country -- with the downside that multiple directors / countries would be just concatenated like "Tom Ford / Luck Besson" (order as it is coming from Kodi server). For actors this does not work as there are too many names chained up.

[shoefone]

Interesting, I'll check out the Test Flight version.

The sort-by-attribute possibility you mentioned sounds useful, it would effectively solve the original issue I think.

For the read-all-in-list problem, there are listings by country / director / etc. in the TV UI of Kodi. I wonder if there's a way of making those lists accessible through the Kodi server's API.

Edit: The 'Get*Nav' (eg GetCountriesNav) parts of video/VideoDatabase.cpp appear to be what the TV UI is calling (in dialogs/GUIDialogSmartPlaylistRule.cpp).

[Buschel]

Such GetCountries. GetDirectors or GetActors method is not documented for the current JSON API. That‘s exactly the problem.