XBMC Sort Order and unRAID problems

[abernardi]

This is an odd one. I'm using my unRAID server for my media with XBMC on my Windows 7 HTPC. It works great, however, I'm running into an interesting problem with the "sort order".  I have a group of movies that have a certain actor in it that I wanted to group together. There's a feature in XBMC that allows for this.  So let's say you want to put all the "James Bond" movies together, you put "James Bond" into the "Sort Order" field of the .nfo file.  I did this for the actor and got unexpected results.  I have XBMC accessing my movies through a share I named..."Movies", original, I know...And it sees it properly as a single share and sorts the movies correctly, EXCEPT the movies I added the additional "Sort Order" field to.  In that case, it seems to see the "Movie" folders on each disk separately.  So, it sorts all the "James Bond" films on disk 1 in alphabetical order, then starts again on disk 2, 3, and so on. Any ideas?

[Paak]

I've never really gone that deep into XBMC before and all my movies are on one drive so far so I'm not going to be of much help, but I'm not quite sure what your question is.  Are all your movies on 1 drive?  I'm guessing you have some Bond movies scattered through out all your drives and it's showing them as it reads them, from different drives. You could try moving your movies around?

[abernardi]

That's the only thing I could think of, to move all the Bond movies to one drive.  Now, as I look closer, it's not even as consistent as I first thought.  It's generally sorting them on a disk to disk basis, but then it throws a red herring in and something on the same disk shows up quite a bit later.  It just becomes a problem because it isn't just the Bond films.  I've made sort lists for a certain actor and for some directors, etc., so it would mean moving around quite a bit of data.  Oh well...

[funbubba]

So let's say you want to put all the "James Bond" movies together, you put "James Bond" into the "Sort Order" field of the .nfo file.  I did this for the actor and got unexpected results.  I have XBMC accessing my movies through a share I named..."Movies", original, I know...And it sees it properly as a single share and sorts the movies correctly, EXCEPT the movies I added the additional "Sort Order" field to.  In that case, it seems to see the "Movie" folders on each disk separately.  So, it sorts all the "James Bond" films on disk 1 in alphabetical order, then starts again on disk 2, 3, and so on. Any ideas?

 

Hey Abernardi, it sounds to me like you literally have "James Bond" on all the sorttitles in the .nfo files.  So in XBMC's point of view, you have (for example) 5 different movies named "James Bond" and I guess it posts them in the same order as it sees them when it scrapes through your network share.

 

Instead try something like this:

 

<title>Casino Royale</title>
<sorttitle>James Bond 1966 - Casino Royale</sorttitle>

<title>The Man with the Golden Gun</title>
<sorttitle>James Bond 1974 - The Man with the Golden Gun</sorttitle>

<title>Never Say Never Again</title>
<sorttitle>James Bond 1983 - Never Say Never Again<sorttitle>

 

Or something like that.  XMBC will display the <title> as the movie's name and will sort it according to <sorttitle>.  Or to make it even simpler just change <title> and don't use <sorttitle> at all.  It's up to you.  Afterwards, either remove the movies from XBMC's library and re-scrape or refresh each movie and have it re-read the .nfo and it should rearrange.

 

[NAS]

Why not just use the XBMC SETS feature

[abernardi]

These are all good suggestions.  What I ended up doing, since I have so many movies I want to sort differently, I just used the playlist function.  It wasn't actually James Bond, I was using that as an example.  Specifically, it was one set of movies that included a certain actor and another set that included a certain director.  Instead of storing all my movies in one folder, I made three separate folders, one for the actor, one for the director and one for the rest, assigned them as sources and then made 2 playlists with a rule that the file name contain the name of the folder of the actor for one and the director for the other.  That seems the easiest way.  Now what I want to figure out is how to add these playlists to the home screen menu.  In the Aeon65 skin, I think I can do that because it has custom fields for the home screen, but I can't find that in Confluence.  I can put Movies and TV shows, but I can't find how to put anything else.  Any ideas?  THANKS!

[furymaster]

Just saw this:

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856107081&Tpk=N82E16856107081

 

only $199!

[kizer]

Why not just use the XBMC SETS feature

 

Exactly what I use.

[Traxxus]

As someone else said, XBMC sets uses sorttitles to do what you want. 

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Movie_Sets

 

I use Ember Media Manager for this (well its a bonus, I use it anyway to generate all my additional movie files, I prefer media streamers to have read only access just in case, so I generate everything for my stuff and copy it over in batches), it hasn't been updated in a while, but it still does it's job.  It has a simple field to fill in the sort title and it will modify your nfo for you.  You'll need to use this for a lot of movies, so you'll learn it fairly quickly.