Sorting by Genre

[mollybc]

I am new to the WDTV SMP and this forum and want to say thanks to all the other users whose posts have helped me answer many questions about operating, setting up and using themes.

I have read thru what seems like thousands of posts and can't seem to find a complete answer.  I have hundreds of movies that I have processed with thumbgen to generate the needed files for the MOJO theme I'm currently using and that is all fine.  What I don't understand is how to properly sort by genre, at least how I think it should work.  The xml files generated by thumbgen each contain multiple genres for each movie, yet when I sort by genre it only reads the first genre.  So even if a movie has a genre tag as animation and adventure it will only show up under one, but not both (e.g. A Bug's Life shows under adventure but not animation when sorted by genre).

So what I want to know is if it is possible to have the movies show up under each of the genres listed in the xml files without having to have two, three or four copies of the same movie in a separate genre folder? 

Also I noted that when using a theme such as Black Mamba, DeVicious recommends turning off the media library function when using her themes.  When I do this there does not seem to be a sort option at all.  So in this case is there a preferred method of sorting movie files?

Thanks for any information.

[Tinwarble · Accepted solution]

Hey mollybc,

Welcome to the forum.

Well first, yes, filtering by genre will only use the first genre listed in the xml.  This is how the firmware handles genre filtering and there is nothing that can be done about that.

So you can either:

  1. Change the xml so that the genre you want a certain movie to be included in is listed first.

  2. (Preferred) Use genre folders to sort your movies.  This is preferred because you will have the same results as filtering by genre, but it will have a better visual experience.

After all Die Hard may have a genre list of:  Action/Adventure/Crime/Drama/Thriller

But it is primarily still just an Action movie.

As for DeVicious recommending turning off the media library, this is because her theme doesn't require it.  However, by doing this you also disable much of the functionality and you will not be able to do many things by turning it off.  I do not recommend it and you should keep your media library on.

[mollybc]

Tinwarble, thanks for the reply and information.  I guess I was hoping the SMP would be smart enough to have a more advanced sorting engine, but it seems not.  I will take your advice and re-arrange all my movies into genre folders as this seems like the best universal approach.  Thanks again for all your help and all of the very informative posts you have made, they have been a great source of info.

[Tinwarble]

Your welcome,

Yes, I agree the SMP/HUB's should be able to read the multiple genres.  However, like I said, sorting your movies into genre folders is the best way and if the filtering is ever fixed so that it will read the multiple genres having them sorted in seperate genre folder will not affect being able to filter by genres.

So if it is ever fixed to filter multiple genres you want have to go back and change anything.

[MitchellJareo]

It should not be hard to give vidoes many genres and thereby sort in multiple genres, given that the media library is stored in an sql database.  As it stands now, the media library is not very well normalized at all.  There is no separate table for genres which mean there is duplicate data in the video table, which is incorrect.  This is database design 101.  If more than one row has the same value for a field than that field should probably be in a separate table. 

There should be a genre table with one row for each genre and a video_genre table which links videos and genres.