2009-07-06, 10:13
The tale of XBMC Nodes in Xe's house....
Xe has a large movie library and a giant TV library (several times bigger than any of the examples listed here). File mode seldom see the light of day for Xe and never for his family.
Xe manages his library and is obsessed with tidyness.
He uses the current nodes as follows:
Movies
======
Title: The majority of the time.
Genre: Fills the gap when he wants to watch something but doesn't know what it is yet.
Year: On the odd occasion when in the mood for something modern or old (Year node not the best for achieving this i.e He is never looking for something made in 1972 but in last xx years etc)
Actor: Once to satisfy a bet a.k.a never
Director: never
Studio: never
TV shows
======
Title: always
Genre: Never
Year: Never
Actor: Never
Director: Never
Studio: Never
His family use XBMC daily but in a slightly different way (not caring about how the back-end works):
First stop is always Recently added. If nothing jumps out there they browse the library genres like...
Movies
======
Title: Rarely
Genre: Almost always
Year: Never
Actor: Never
Director: never
Studio: Never
TV shows
======
Title: Always
Genre: Never
Year: Never
Actor: Never
Director: Never
Studio: Never
Right enough with the third person writing Xe...
We use Nodes for when we don't know what movies to watch however that is becoming less and less useful. It was fine when the Mrs could go to the Horror movie genre and there were 20 movies there but now there are 500 its less useful.
Filters sound like the perfect solution with one caveat. Starting from the big list and then applying a filter requires that the big list loads fast. After a point the big list gets slow to load even on fast hardware. For example my Tv show list takes 60+ seconds to load when initially entering and also most of the time when going from Season level back up to the main level. Yes the collection is huge and that's why it is slow but to stay as useful this needs to be taken into account.
For the younglings browsing by movie rating would be useful as there are suitable movies in quite a few genres and not an immediately family proof way to find them.
Speaking hypothetically "less is more in this household". Trying to explain all the XBMC features is an ongoing chore and anything intuitive that can work with a few remote control buttons wins big.
As an example If we could filter for modern horror movies with a big budget and a decent IMDB rating intuitively that would help alot. Being presented with a list of plot keywords remaining after the filter had been applied if done right would help alot too.
Recently added TV and Movies is a firm favourite here. One major downside of the recently added tv lists is that it often gets saturated out by the replacement of a tv recorded ep with a dvd rip. I often have 25 new individual eps for 25 different shows all lined up to watch then the addition of a new dvd season pushes 22 of them out the list. Thats a pain that would benefit from a solution of "filter the last xx eps from unique shows added"
Hope this helps
Xe has a large movie library and a giant TV library (several times bigger than any of the examples listed here). File mode seldom see the light of day for Xe and never for his family.
Xe manages his library and is obsessed with tidyness.
He uses the current nodes as follows:
Movies
======
Title: The majority of the time.
Genre: Fills the gap when he wants to watch something but doesn't know what it is yet.
Year: On the odd occasion when in the mood for something modern or old (Year node not the best for achieving this i.e He is never looking for something made in 1972 but in last xx years etc)
Actor: Once to satisfy a bet a.k.a never
Director: never
Studio: never
TV shows
======
Title: always
Genre: Never
Year: Never
Actor: Never
Director: Never
Studio: Never
His family use XBMC daily but in a slightly different way (not caring about how the back-end works):
First stop is always Recently added. If nothing jumps out there they browse the library genres like...
Movies
======
Title: Rarely
Genre: Almost always
Year: Never
Actor: Never
Director: never
Studio: Never
TV shows
======
Title: Always
Genre: Never
Year: Never
Actor: Never
Director: Never
Studio: Never
Right enough with the third person writing Xe...
We use Nodes for when we don't know what movies to watch however that is becoming less and less useful. It was fine when the Mrs could go to the Horror movie genre and there were 20 movies there but now there are 500 its less useful.
Filters sound like the perfect solution with one caveat. Starting from the big list and then applying a filter requires that the big list loads fast. After a point the big list gets slow to load even on fast hardware. For example my Tv show list takes 60+ seconds to load when initially entering and also most of the time when going from Season level back up to the main level. Yes the collection is huge and that's why it is slow but to stay as useful this needs to be taken into account.
For the younglings browsing by movie rating would be useful as there are suitable movies in quite a few genres and not an immediately family proof way to find them.
Speaking hypothetically "less is more in this household". Trying to explain all the XBMC features is an ongoing chore and anything intuitive that can work with a few remote control buttons wins big.
As an example If we could filter for modern horror movies with a big budget and a decent IMDB rating intuitively that would help alot. Being presented with a list of plot keywords remaining after the filter had been applied if done right would help alot too.
Recently added TV and Movies is a firm favourite here. One major downside of the recently added tv lists is that it often gets saturated out by the replacement of a tv recorded ep with a dvd rip. I often have 25 new individual eps for 25 different shows all lined up to watch then the addition of a new dvd season pushes 22 of them out the list. Thats a pain that would benefit from a solution of "filter the last xx eps from unique shows added"
Hope this helps
