Media Library Stinks Like a Monkey's Butt

[DeVicious]

I keep my fingers crossed that the DEA will never buy a WDTV Live Hub, I would be worried for their coders. I have seen many stupid things in my life, but never something so incredibly dull as this library. In what universe in the year 2012, 16 years after the introduction of an ID3 tag do I need to create a playlist in order to keep my tracks sorted? In what universe is a library NOT having the option to sort by file names. How can the sorting order be universal through out all categories and folders??? What supervisor would approve an impossible sorting order for let's say TV Shows? Why can the gallery view read out an xml file and the other views can't This inconsistency is the work of people who obviously never used the hub themselves. The are the absolute basics of a media center. I can totally live without that garbage and can create my themes around it, but people are obsessive about it to turn it on. Fact is it doesn't need a library to, ratings and hearts can be put in a 1kb xml file stored in a (let's call it) library folder. Why does it need an experience damaging library to run the "get content info?" I am sure 90% of all people have a proper tagged music library in iTunes or Winamp, why would I have to waste hours to get the same results as on my Mac/PC with my WD device? Can't you just read the id3 tag and display the actual title instead of the file name? My friend just wrote a 3kb file that can do that. The library is completely unnecessary, regardless if you use the native id3 tags built in scraper or generate xml files with thumbgen or mp3tag for music or videos, just read that xml/id3 tag file and transport the corresponding tags on the screen. Open up the firmware for our own tags, we obviously know a lot more about usability and design.

[Medic]

This i noticed after updating to 3.03.xx last week ... TV Show episodes are sorted random in every folder like there's no alfabetic order. Rolled back to 2.07.xx and the sorting works fine again using file names.

Looks like somewhere in the FW dev. they started using the xml <title> to sort the files or lets say try to sort the files.

[DeVicious]

@ Medic

it is sorting by episode title

[JoeySmyth]

Media Library Stinks Like a Monkey's Butt ...

and we (the customers) are expected to enjoy the smell. 

[DeVicious]

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JoeySmyth wrote:

Media Library Stinks Like a Monkey's Butt ...

and we (the customers) are expected to enjoy the smell. 

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Hahahaha get out of my head I was just watching that prior to my post, lol

[Kazgor]

Media Library is (or was in my case) turned on by default when i got the HUB. 

Now we clever people can get in there and turn thing off and tweak thing here and there.. but i pitty the normal consumer who picks up the hub or any media centre and then wonder what the heck is going on... and you know we the ones that get the phone calls asking to come round and fix it.

I still have an aging MP3 player i use for holidays has it has the best Library function... and shock of horrors that is because some clever people (not the original company) were able to get rid of the firmware and replace it with there own. custom firmware with sensible CODE, that understood the concept of Track numbers, Complication Albums, etc.

So totally agree.. I have Library mode off and i cant really see what i have lost....

[DeVicious]

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Kazgor wrote:
 

So totally agree.. I have Library mode off and i cant really see what i have lost....

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well we're loosing the possibility to but particular movie info into the other pages where they could sit well and spice up the look but for no good reasons they stopped allowing that after the gallery view. The sad thing is it is not even a days work to achieve that for all pages.

[pearl]

There is very little that I complain about with the HUB as I think for the $$ it does a lot of great stuff, but I have to agree that the ordering of music and movies drives me crazy, and forces me to edit names and XML files constantly to get stuff in the right order.

I notice the the most with folders/directories that have movies that I need in chronological order. For example I have 30+ Abbott & Costello movies in a folder. Once I have used HubGen to scape the data, I need to go into the XML files and rename the title from <Title>Movie Name (year)<Title/> to <Title>(year) Movie Name<Title/>  for them to show in the correct order, or else it is strictly alphabetical. Not a killer, but it just makes sense to have the option to have things in chronological order.

And then to add to that, for TV series, for me they do seem to go in order based on air-date (which has me baffled), but works fine. Seems like no consistancy at all.

I will say that I can manually adjust everything within the XML files to get what I want with my movies, and with music I have just gotten used to naming songs 01. songname, 02 songname etc. It all works, but seems like they could make this easier on my than having to manipulate everything by hand

-P

[DeVicious]

Pearl, couldn't you just turn off the library after scraping the info? With library off everything shows in the order as intended

[Steffen_2009]

DeVicious, you are expressing exactly what I feel !  

In one of my support/incident calls WD answered to to the topic

"Not having the Music-ID3 tags in albumplayback.xml (when libary turned off)":

It is a feature of the WD TV to only have this with the libary on turned , oh dear