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Carneth

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Carneth

Hi all,

 

so, here's an idea, I'd like to have all my TV in a TV category.. Funnily enough, that all works perfectly..

 

However, i'd like to be able to go "into" my TV library and see all my TV shows, as i do now.. but, for example.. I'd quite like when I go into a Star Trek item, for it to open up a sub-category, with the same kind of home-screen that TV gets..

 

I can get the category/library for Star Trek, obviously, by creating a new library.. but.. then I'll end up with a top level menu/navigation of: Kids Movies, Kids TV, Movies, TV, Star Trek..

 

And the reason - probably obvious - for this is that there are multiple star trek series', like TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, original... Plus there's:

 

- Stargate,

- Breaking Bad,

- Life on mars, 

- probably a MILLION others

 

 

So, my thinking is, you open up TV, and you get all the shows.. except, for the sub libraries, you get 1 item, perhaps with an indicator to show it's a sub library ... You enter that, and it gives you the same kind of home screen (based on type) as per the parent library, e.g. with a random item, favorites, next up, resume etc.. 

 

 

As a file structure, it could look like:

 

\TV\Normal Series 1\Season NN

\TV\Normal Series 2\Season NN

...

\TV\Breaking Bad[subLibrary]\Breaking Bad\Season NN

\TV\Breaking Bad[subLibrary]\Better Call Saul\Season NN

 

\TV\Life on Mars[subLibrary]\Life on Mars\Season NN

\TV\Life on Mars[subLibrary]\Ashes to Ashes\Season NN

 

\TV\Stargate[subLibrary]\Stargate - SG1\Season NN

\TV\Stargate[subLibrary]\Stargate - Atlantis\Season NN

 

\TV\Star Trek[subLibrary]\Star Trek\Season NN

\TV\Star Trek[subLibrary]\Star Trek - Deep Space 9\Season NN

\TV\Star Trek[subLibrary]\Star Trek - The Next Generation\Season NN

\TV\Star Trek[subLibrary]\Star Trek - Voyager\Season NN

 

 

I know you can have a similar structure supported in terms of the file system, dropping the tag and marking Breaking Bad/Star Trek etc as TV.. but then in the TV library, all seasons show up as their own item, not collapsed into a single parent item...

 

I also assume that the tag in the folder name is probably considered a legacy mechanism.. it would be neater to have an option in the metadata manager to "create sub library" or something.. and then add items to it... similar to, though not identical to, collections.. a bit close to how collections used to behave ... bit again, still different..

 

 

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What, exactly, is different about this from Collections?

 

Basically, that is our feature to provide what you are looking for.

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Carneth

there are a few couple of differences... Although, I feel one thing here is almost 'ideologically' / 'conceptually' going to conflict with how things work.. 

 

so

 

1) What I'm looking for with something like these Star Trek or Breaking Bad libraries, is a 'home screen' much like each library currently has, which features a link to all items, resume items from within that library, next up for a given season within that TV library, etc... Those components, which I don't get when I open a collection... Within a collection I only get the list of items..

 

2) This may be a bug perhaps, but, currently, when I am in - for example - my Movies library and I go to Collections, I get to see all collections across all libraries of the same type (that's allowed for my user). Such that, i see all the collections from Movies and also all collections from Kid's Movies.. Despite selecting 'collections' from within Movies... This means that I'm not really using Collections all that much... It just seems odd to see Collections I'm not expecting.. 

 

3) More details, on what I was wanting with this sub library idea is that they should appear collapsed when viewed from the All Items parent category,  navigation would go like:

- Browse to the TV library,

- See the TV library home-page...

- Navigate to All TV...

- See all the items,

- Star Trek (or breaking bad or whatever) appears as a single item, not each show appearing as a discrete item...

- Navigate to Star Trek,

- see Star Trek homepage,

- Critically with the same layout as the TV homepage / home screen / home menu, just focused on the Star Trek shows exclusively ("all - star trek - shows", "random show", "resume DS9 Episode X", "Next Up Voyager Season 2 Episode 5", "because you watched Star Trek you might like Battlestar Galactica".. etc )

 

Excluding the home page thing, this is kind of how Boxsets/Collections used to look like... A single item in the "all view", click it and get the items within....

 

With point 3, I think I get it (as I said with my first sentence), i figure that is diametrically opposed to what you are doing with "All Items".. Plus, am i missing something... is there a way to make Collections have their own home-screen features? 

 

To be fair, if point 2 behaved how I expected, it would be nice.. i.e. only collections from that library.. 

 

I just also really like these library home screens, and thought it would be nice to have sub-home screens for groups of TV shows... Without having to create a top-level library for Star Trek/Breaking Bad etc... because that will end up with a looooong list of top-level libraries..

Edited by Carneth
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Collections aren't restricted to a single library.  In fact, in your example, you would have a collection with both TV and Movies in it.

 

Therefore, it is impossible to scope them to a Library.

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bfir3

I can provide a use case that is maybe more common or desired:

 

For me, I would like sub-libraries for foreign content, maybe even documentaries. For example, let's look at my current home screen:

 

BckQ8Mw.jpg

 

Right now I have all Foreign and Documentary content in their own libraries for TV/Movies. If a user navigates to one of these, they will see all the items contained in that folder. But what if a user is interested in only British foreign content, or only Norwegian, etc. It would be nice if clicking on the Foreign TV/Movies brought the user to a page similar to the homepage but had sub-libraries like British/Swedish/Norwegian/etc. Similarly this could be cool for Documentaries as I could split them up like Nature/Animals/Space/etc.

 

As far as I know, the closest thing we have to achieve something like this is to separate the content on the file system in different folders and add those as libraries in Emby. This isn't the worst solution, but it will continue to increase the amount of libraries on the home screen, and it is already over-populated.

 

And actually, it would even be nice to be able to go multiple layers deep so to speak. Ideally my homepage would show Movies/TV/Anime/Music. Clicking on TV would bring me to a page similar to the homescreen showing Television/Animated/Foreign/Documentary, and then clicking on each of those would drill down further to another homescreen styled page showing further sub-libraries as described above.

 

For now, I've been using the Collections view to add things like British TV, Space Documentary, etc. The only downside is that the Collections view does not offer the same functionality as a normal library does as it doesn't show the Suggestions/Next Up/Upcoming/etc tabs.

 

This kind of structure can be implemented in some Kodi skins, and this is the way my Kodi is currently setup. When I launch Kodi I don't see the 10+ library items on my home screen. Instead I just have Movies/TV/Music/Anime and within each section I have additional menu items that allow the user to enter each of the Emby libraries. I know that this is an oft sought feature for Kodi users as homescreen customization seems to come up a lot in Skin discussion on the forums. I think it would also benefit Emby to have similar options for the web client.

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