XBMC Smart Playlists Library Filter Suggestion

[midgetspy]

Currently you can filter your library by any ONE category (Genre, Title, Actor, Year, etc)

It would be great if I could filter it by more than a single one of those categories (or rather, by more than one filter in a single category). The current filter is implemented simply by creating "folders" for each filter, which inherantly (forced by the GUI) limits it to a single filter at a time. Since the library is an SQL database, there's no complexity increase by allowing more than one filter at a time, it's just a GUI issue really.

Admittedly, most cases with specific filters involving title, actor, or director would probably be pretty specific cases and the user could make a smart playlist for that instead. Even year can, for the most part, be done by sorting your library by year and then just scrolling to the part you want. For genre, though, I often find myself wishing I could use that cut down the number of movies I have to look through to pick something to watch. For example, depending on my mood maybe I know I want to watch:

- a romantic comedy, or action comedy, etc (filter any movies that don't have both genres)
- anything but a horror movie (don't feel like a scary movie, so any movie that doesn't have the horror genre)
- an action movie that's not sci fi (has action genre and DOESN'T have sci-fi genre)
- something in 720p with 5.1 audio (whoops that's my other feature request thread ;-P)

I think the best way to do this is to have a filter dialog instead of (or in addition to) the folders. The dialog could, for example, have a list of every genre with 3 radio buttons beside it:

Genre Include Exclude Optional
Action x
Comedy x
Romance x
Horror x
Thriller x
Adventure x
Sci-Fi x

My include/exclude/optional wording maybe isn't clear, but above is an example of how you'd make it only display your romantic comedies (require Romance and Comedy genres, any additional genres don't matter). Or, for the "i'll watch anything but a horror" filter:

Genre Include Exclude Optional
Action x
Comedy x
Romance x
Horror x
Thriller x
Adventure x
Sci-Fi x

And my last example, an action movie that isn't a sci-fi:

Genre Include Exclude Optional
Action x
Comedy x
Romance x
Horror x
Thriller x
Adventure x
Sci-Fi x

This would take a minimal amount of work for the user to set his filters and could help a great deal in filtering libraries - especially large ones. I've got about 500 movies and it takes ages to look through them all, I can only imagine how long it'd take to browse through 1000+ movies to decide what you want to watch.

Does anybody else think something like this would be useful?

[rwparris2]

Admittedly, most cases with specific filters involving title, actor, or director would probably be pretty specific cases and the user could make a smart playlist for that instead.

You can make smart playlists to do exactly what you're describing. The whole 'optional' part is unnecessary as anything that isn't expressly included or excluded is irrelevant.

I don't think this is an awful idea, but I do think most users would not want such an advanced filter & the functionality is already there for power users.

[jmarshall]

Agreed that smartplaylists are the way to go (at least as far as the underlying mechanism goes).

I'm open to improving the UI for it, but I quite like the one we have.

Obviously one thing we want is a better way to allow users to insert smartplaylists in to a directory structure if they want (i.e. allow the libraries to be customisable).

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Rand Al Thor]

Hi JM, I didn't want to start a new thread as this one is called "XBMC Smart Playlists Library Filter Suggestion" and that is exactly what I have! I think it would be nice (unless it is already possible and I just don't know how to do it) to be able to include the TV section of the library in Smart Playlists. I know that you would probably NOT want this on at all times so an added check box labled "Search Tv Series" or something like that would be great.

So, now you are wondering why, right? Lots of shows have christmas, halloween, etc specials. I have already added all of these as "custom" genres to my movies but I would like to be able to make a smartplaylist that would list all movies and tv episodes that might fall under this category. I am sure there are other uses of such and addition as well. Cheers.

[jmarshall]

You can't currently "mix" the playlists, other than music + musicvideos.

Mixing is tricky from a UI point of view as it is setup currently - it requires quite a different UI to be effective.

[Rand Al Thor]

I can see where it could be an issue in the ui because movies and tv episodes have different aspect ratios for their images. However, I think that could be overcome fairly easily with some fancy skinning. There are probably a lot of other UI issues that I am just not thinking of. You are the expert after all ;) This has not always been the behavior of playlists has it? I seem to remember a while back making a playlist of mixed tv and movies manually. Hmm.

Edit: I thought I would just give it a try and you CAN actually still manually create a mixed tv and movies playlist. As mentioned before the aspect of the covers/episode is a little weird. So JM, is it worth adding a feature request to trac to add tv to smartplaylists or is this one of those features that the devs have discussed and decided against? Cheers.

[spiff]

tv is already in xsp's you just cannot mix shows/episodes and movies as jm said

[Rand Al Thor]

Ok, I gotcha on that. What I am wondering is if there is a technical reason that mixing is not an option, aside from the ui funkyness. Or if it is just a feature that hasn't been asked/suggested before. As I mentioned above, perhaps a check box to enable a mixed tv/movie playlist to cut down on headaches for people who don't want to mix. Anyway, If it warrants a feature request on trac I will be glad to do it. If it is just impossible due to technical limitations let me know. Cheers guys and thanks for the replies.

[jmarshall]

The UI problem I was talking about has nothing to do with how the files are listed.

The UI problem is, instead, a problem with how to do it from the smartplaylist creation interface. We have 6 different types of content. Allowing all possible combinations (63 I think?) is quite a feat without having a radio button style interface, which is kinda ugly. Many of those combinations make no sense, though, so perhaps you could have a think about all possible combinations and the ones you think we should allow, and we can go from there to come up with an interface that might work.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Rand Al Thor]

Ahh, ok. I will have a bit of time today to mull it over and see if I can come up with an easy eye pleasing way of making it work. Cheers JM.