2012-10-03, 22:39
(2012-10-01, 17:51)eg4190 Wrote:(2012-09-27, 21:57)thebearnecessit Wrote: too many of one show on a channel - my smarty playlist is showing way more of one show than the others because there are simply so many episodes of that show in my library, is there any way of getting a smart playlist to show a more even spread?
There's a pretty intuitive workaround for this. I stumbled upon it when I was creating my Bat-Channel, which alternates Batman movies with episodes from all of the TV series. The problem, of course, is that there have only been about 7 or 8 Batman movies including cartoons, but there are hundreds of Batman episodes. My first version of the custom playlist didn't take this into account, and as a result the channel was all TV episodes -- the movies had about a 1-in-50 chance of being played at any given time.
Creating a mixed movie/tv playlist requires that you first make separate playlists for movies and TV shows, then combine them into one mixed playlist. So, my solution to the Batman problem was to limit the number of episodes in the TV playlist to 10 random episodes, but to place no similar limit for Batman movies. The result is that the channel now has about a 50/50 chance of playing a movie or TV show at any given time.
So, if you want to have an Animated Sitcom channel, and you're only getting Simpsons episodes and hardly any Clerks episodes, you can use the same solution. First, create a Simpsons.xsp file that pulls 25 random episodes, then point to that (instead of the entire series) in your Animated Sitcom.xsp file. That will level out the playing field between The Simpsons and other shows that have fewer episodes. You can do this for any long-running series that make up the channel.
I thought this would be a good solution as well but never bothered to try it because the documentation says it wouldnt work.
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Sma..._Playlists
Im glad somebody did though because its a serious problem on a lot my channels, good work.