Group series of movies together (1 Viewer)

johnloon

New Member
February 21, 2008
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Created movieboxes patch

I've created a patch which implements some grouping functionality.
Please have a look at the issue-tracker (link in first post) and feel free to put recommendations/comments here....
 

clahti

Portal Member
November 19, 2008
27
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I also just setup the development environment to poke around some ideas on this as well. My feeling is that we need another "view" or improve the List View for this functionality. This would easily be accomplished by

  • Adding a "Collection" field to the database
  • Adding UI functionality to assign Collection to movies as desired
  • movies that belong to the same Collection appear as a folder in list view
  • selecting the folder would then list the movies in that Collection

You could even use icon/filmstrip view for this purpose, just have a generic "cover" that when selected displays only that Collection. Movies that have no Collection value would just appear after all of the Collection folders like a pseudo filesystem view. This would work well with the filtering as well, so for example lets say you have all of your bond flicks in a Collection called "James Bond 007". You then filter your movies by "Action and Adventure" genre. The resulting display would show a folder called "James Bond 007 Collection" because these movies are part of this genre, followed by all other movies in that genre that are not part of a collection. To make sure we get proper database normalization I would add a pane to the config dialog where you can add your desired Collection strings, then on the Movie Details pane have a drop list so you can select a Collection or leave this blank/unselected for the movie by default. Does this make sense? Any other ideas?
 

fforde

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June 7, 2007
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Thanks for the patch johnloo, we will take a look and see how we can integrate this into our upcoming release. For future reference though, you should really jump into our IRC channel and share your thoughts when developing patches, you will have a much greater chance of your patch getting integrated as is that way. We do a lot of colaboration on design and we have some ideas that we have discussed, but are not fully fleshed out on the issue tracker, so it is always a good idea to get the whole team's feedback before coding anything that makes signifigant changes.

Clahti, what you are describing will definitely be available in version 0.8. We are implementing a filtering system which, from a user interface standpoint, will have two interfaces. First you'll have a popup that lets you filter by some standard stuff similar to the existing "sort by" feature. This will be fully customizable though and you'll be able to setup complex filters (pretty much anything you can think of) to be listed on this menu. In addition to this we will have a new interface up front (optional) that can be configured with different filters. So for example you could set it up so that when you start Moving Pictures you would see a list that you can drill down into, that looks something like this.

Code:
Genre
  - Action
  - Comedy
  - Drama
  - Horror
  - etc...
Recently Added
  - Added This Week
  - Added This Month
  - Added Last Month
  - etc...
Collections
  - James Bond
  - Star Wars
  - The Matrix Trilogy
  - Aliens
  - etc...

We haven't started working on the menu system too much yet, but the idea is it would be very customizable and allow you to group and categorize your movies as you see fit.
 

clahti

Portal Member
November 19, 2008
27
2
Here is a quick mock-up to show what I mean :
 

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johnloon

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February 21, 2008
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First of all, thanks for the quick replies. I'm happy i'm not the only one interested in this functionality :D

My implementation is similar to what clahti is suggesting, except that I've mixed the collection with the "normal" movies. So right now in my "root folder" I have 1 movie "James Bond" which I filled with details copied (1 click) from 1 of the movies. Clicking this movie shows a list of all movies in the James Bond collection.
This functionality is not tied to 1 of the views, but works in every view as it is in fact a filter.

fforde: Joined the IRC-channel.
I'm open to any discussion/suggestion, but I wanted to share what I'd already built. I just started experimenting with developing for Moving Pictures and managed to get this implemented faster then I expected, which was before I joined the IRC-channel :oops:

As for the menu system: will the filtering be using extra fields in the movieinfo-table or how will you manage collections?
 

armandp

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  • April 6, 2008
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    To add to what fforde just explained about the menu system here's a webbased mockup/demo of the idea:

    Filter Menu Demo .

    The menu is partly auto-generated (using available movie properties) and user customized.
    However this might not end up as being the exact implementation (it was more part of the envisioning process)

    feel free btw to grab the web sources from that location as you can cretae your own mediaportal menu mockups by changing the filter_demo.xml
     

    clahti

    Portal Member
    November 19, 2008
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    johnloon, I applied your patch to svn trunk and compiled, grouping works (yay). I have a few observations:

    when creating a group:
    • multiselect works (yay)
    • sort order is "The Blah Blah Blah", perhaps should be "Blah Blah, The" to match default movingpictures sorting

    when in the main gui
    • sort by name works, but seems to default to reverse order (may be not your issue)
    • sort by date added works
    • sort by year works, treats all collections as year zero (also in reverse order strangely)
    • sort by file path does not work near as I can tell (perhaps should treat this like year, IE no path just collection name and appear at the front of the list?)
    • pregnant pause when getting to main screen (may be unsolvable, I have 1200 movies to sort/filter/group :D)
    • strange rapid random scrolling in the main screen, entertaining but unknown cause

    That is a quick and dirty, I am anxious to see fford's filtering. One improvement I might suggest is to have a default coverart and backdrop for collections, even cooler would be to generate a backdrop as a mosaic of all of the coverart files for the movies in the collection. Another improvement could be the notion of automatic grouping by folder. It is a bit tedious to create groups or collections for a large library such as mine. If automatic groups could be created based on the subfolder name of the parent root for moving pictures this would be awesome. so for instance say library is on z:\Movies. you could add a function to say all folders under z:\Movies are a collection and auto add these to the moviebox entries, populated with the movies in the subfolder. That would be groovy.

    Right now I am looking at mediainfo integration :D

    Cheers
     

    spongedoor

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    January 9, 2009
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    I also want this idea! moving pictures is great but without it I cant use it!

    I think it should be seamless.. not sectioned. What I mean is, the ideas of previous posters are saying put the 007 collections seperate from the other movies.. i think what you want to do is in the normal videos mode you can sort by shares.. do THAT! then you will have a 007 folder with the picture of your choice (renamed "folder") and away you go.. also the movies will need to be in order.. so make EACH folder customisable.. so that you view 007 folder, switch it to sort by year and you wont have any un-needed extra numbers.. job done! not all films and especially 007 movies are numbered like lethal weapon 1 2 and 3.. and 4 so sort by year instead. Basically its the same as the normal video with fanart and laid out better, with movie info etc.. I want to see more actor grab info also please see my other post https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/get-support-90/myvideos-n-moving-pictures-views-help-58963/?highlight=movie+views

    glad to see its being worked on
     

    narkotic

    Portal Member
    January 13, 2009
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    This would be sweet! Creating categories could be done with this yes? Lets say I have a bunch of workout videos, I'd like to be able to select "workout vids"...
     

    garyday

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    March 1, 2006
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    This look great, I like the idea of collections -- but please keep the filtering simple ...

    If I select Genre, then i should see genres - then all movies under that genre,
    If I select Title, then just show me all titles, don't do this "a-c" think like mediaportal music does, I don't think
    that grouping is necessary.

    I would say if you can get filtering into 0.8 and collections into 0.85 that would be fine, I'd love to be able to help buy
    haven't done any programming for donkeys years.

    G
     

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