Filter videos when browsing

[Rick Macdonald]

When in a supported container present a filter action item that can restrict content based on browsable categories i.e. Ratings, Genre etc...

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I reported Issue#95, where you mentioned:

In the mean time, you can browse via the Ratings category if you are specifically interested.

The typical DLNA usage of most of the metatdata is to just filter on that one value. For example, all videos with a Rating of "PG", or a Genre of "Comedy". This is rarely very useful. Typically, I'd like to see, for example when watching with the family ;-), all Genres except "Horror" and "Sci-Fi" with all ratings except "R".

Arguably, multiple selection only makes sense for "Rating" and "Genre", and being able to restrict the search to just "Movies" or just "Series". I can't imagine including Actors, Titles, Years, etc in this feature.

A typical implementation would be a scrollable list of checkBoxes. There can be buttons for "Select All" and "Clear All", or sometimes you'll see that selecting none for one of the categories such as Rating is the same as selecting all Ratings. Sometimes when the total list is long, each category is in an expandable list defaulting to all selected. Anything of the sort seems to work well.

[Will Lunniss]

Intesting idea. For movies, it could actually be very easy to present a filter to restict content to certain genres and ratings once you are in the movies container.

Series would be more complicated, as the information from the server is associated with the episodes, not the series containers. The third party metadata can help there, but I've so far avoided using that for browsing purposes to avoid the need to sync it all in advance.

Would you want to save your filters, or would you be fine with entering them each time?

[Rick Macdonald]

My personal needs are likely a subset of what you might want to implement generally for all users.

I mentioned "Series", but really I would always only select "Movies". I mentioned it because I don't know how movies and series are separated. If they aren't separated, I'd want to restrict the results to just Movies. I'm confused because Band of Brothers and Firefly both show up in the Movies listing!

I would not ask to save filter sets.

[Rick Macdonald]

Will, you mentioned "3rd party metadata". This probably isn't the place to ask, but...

I originally thought that all metadata came from the Serviio server, but the ServiiGo credits mention the TMDb and TVDB etc APIs. Also, ServiiGo has a menu item when viewing an individual viedo that says "Update online metadata".

Can you point me to a document orf discussion that explains all these metadata issues?

I'm really quite surprised that Serviio has no ability to edit metatdata, and I don't see that ServiiGo actually overrides anything that comes from the server. I have several movies with all details but no rating, and a few that have metadata from the wrong movie even after renaming the file with filebot.

[Will Lunniss]

Serviio sends details about a video along with online identifiers (IMDB Id, TMDb Id and TVDB Id). ServiiGo then uses online metadata sources (which are the same sources that Serviio uses, bar the OMDB which ServiiGo uses for IMDB ratings) to fetch additional metadata to overlay on top of what Serviio sends to ServiiGo, such as backdrops, larger posters, cast members.

So, if a video is incorectly identified by Serviio, then ServiiGo will present the same wrong metadata for it as well.

[Rick Macdonald]

Thinking about this some more...

It seems to me that the metadata presented by DLNA falls into a few types:

• the dynamic lists of Last Viewed and Last Added
• "containers" (or virtual folders, collections, whatever you like to call them): Movies, Series, Folders
• attributes suitable for filtering: Genres, Ratings, and other attributes arguably not so suitable for filtering: Titles, Actors, Years

DLNA presents these all at the same level. My suggestion of multiple selection is a start, but it occurs to me now that another way to look at it is that the "true" filtering attributes, especially Rating and Genre, could be available at a global level.

For example, I would like to select multiple attributes after choosing a container, such as a folder under "Folders". Another user might want to choose multiple attributes without choosing a container (which is how it works now except you can only select a single attribute, such as Rating=PG). I suppose you could say there is an implied container "All" that might be nice to see explicitly if we were to have global filter access.

Currently, a swipe from the left in ServiiGo gives the top-level selection menu, but selecting any attribute always goes back to the implied "All" container. By "global" access to filtering, I'm suggesting that accessing the filters (swipe from left or whatever the implementation might be) gets applied to the view that I'm currently looking at (which could be one of my physical folders).

Does that at least make sense?

Maybe I do things differently, but I only use Folders, and never the virtual "Movies" or "Series" containers that Serviio provides. The main reason is that I manually (aided by a program I wrote) move watched shows into a watched folder. Part of my folder tree contains:

Movies TvShows Watched_Movies Watched_TvShows

If I look at Serviio's "Movies" list, it contains all my watched movies mixed in with unwatched (and the same with Series). One of the reasons that I physically move watched shows into other folders is that I use a sync program to copy a subset of my unwatched shows to a USB drive to carry with me when I go to the cottage, etc.

[Will Lunniss]

Yes that all makes sense.

It will only work for metadata that exposes a way to browse via it (e.g. Ratings/Genre) so that I can build up a list of all posible values for presenting the filter dialog. But I think that should be fine.

It will however result in the number of child items being wrong. I.e. you might click on a folder which has 20 files, and there only be 3, or non at all, because of the filter rules. So it will work best when you have all videos in the same container.