[pko66]

I guess if one has thousands of movies then a breakdown is necessary just to manage the listing - if so, I'd be interested in how people group their movies and shows under this scenario from a browsing point of view.

Hello, Jonathan.

I have a few thousand movies and a few hundred tvshows and never use library mode, this is why:

1) If it actually could classify my movies:
- A flat listing of movies is just unmanageable
- Lists by actor/director is just the same (too many of them)
- year is not practical
- Genre is not useful because:
a) the genres in IMDB are not what I'd choose (and if you use different, multinational scrapers the results are just too heterogeneous. Even when the scraper actually FINDS the correct movie data)
b) each movie gets usually classified in several genres, so it is like if I had MANY thousand movies, not just "a few thousand", and most genres become unmanageable, again

So, How I manage the movies, the breakdown you mention? by file system hierarchy. The classification is, of course, my own, but it makes sense to me. A main classification is: kids/dubbed/subtitled/in spanish (I am spanish). The "dubbed" movies then get divided in "mainstream" (mostly USA), "european" and "other. The same classification in "subtitled". Then, and only then, do I apply the "traditional" genre classification (on my own - I use far less genres than IMDB, like ten or so).

I think the file hierarchy should be incorporated into the classification somehow (maybe optional, maybe instead of genres, maybe in addition to genres, being an "upper" node...). For people with large movie collections it is a must.


2) But actually, library does not work for me for these reasons:
- Many of the movies I watch are not easily incorporated into the library: do not have IMDB entry, or the title is translated and so is almost impossible to detect the correct movie without some manual intervention
- I have 3 servers and only one of them is always online (the other came online using wake on lan when needed and turn off themselves a few hours later)
- I move files to the offline servers periodically
- even using nfo files, even limiting to the online server, from the xbox the refresh library process takes forever to run and usually crashes the machine (or it seems to be crashed)
- due to all the manual work involved, I have nfo files for only a part of my movies, it usually takes several months since I get a movie and have the time to "nfo" it with an external utility.

A workaround to most of that could be a "fast" refresh: it would delete/add from the library the (un)available files (should explore just the "online" entries, of course) and do not access the web but use just the available data (title, thumbnail files, "genre" from the file system hierarchy, maybe info from the nfo files). That could perhaps be fast enough to execute always on start without taking too many time nor crashing the xbox.

For all that reasons, the library and what/where is really available would be just too different things. And multiply that for 4 different XBOX (and some computers) for different people (we all share the servers and network)

So I always use file mode, but I miss all that functionality of the library, IMHO it is one of the greatest things in XBMC.

If you have read till here... thank you very much!!!! and if not... well, thank you all the same, you make a great work for a great project.