yaksplat 58 Posted October 11, 2013 Share Posted October 11, 2013 Most of the media that I have is set up in folders with season structures with the exception of a few, such as Looney Tunes or Disney Cartoons, which are set up as subfolders by character. Looney Tunes > Bugs Bunny > Season 1 > all files Looney Tunes > Daffy Duck > Season 1 > all files Disney > Mickey Mouse > Season 1 > all files ... many many more.... In MBT once I click on looney tunes or Disney, then I see nothing when I click on Season, since there are no seasons and it's really just a parent folder for related folders. This worked on MB2. So, from a spec standpoint. If folder contains folders labeled S01...etc show seasons, else if there are folders with are not labeled S01...etc then show sub folders. Does that make sense? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Solution Luke 37010 Posted October 12, 2013 Solution Share Posted October 12, 2013 That is not a documented convention in MB3, so at this time it's not happening, sorry. The fact that it worked in MB2 is not a deciding factor. MB3 is becoming more data driven and less folder driven, because there's so many more things you can do with rich data. What I can do is change the collection browsing to not use the rich series page, and instead use the folder page so that you can see everything. And then limit the rich data pages to the views on the home page. That's going to have to happen anyway in order to support all the random structures you guys are going to inevitably have. But that's the beauty of having a contract (library structure), and having everybody follow it. If you honor the contract, I give you rich, awesome displays. If you don't, I give you generic folder displays. But you can't have both. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yaksplat 58 Posted October 12, 2013 Author Share Posted October 12, 2013 The only thing that's good for is organizing chaos into different chaos. There were many arguments at the site about how they should be organized and there was no true right answer. The solution was the site admin decided was the right way and hell with any other solution as he deleted any variations that he didn't agree with. When you throw them into year seasons you have no method of finding what you want unless you know what year something came out in. There are about 500+ files spread out over 59 years or more, and it gets really nasty to find anything unless you know exactly what year you should be looking in. Years don't have meaning like seasons do. You can remember that something happened in season 2 of a show, but where did 'peppy le-pew' appear. He'd be extremely difficult to find. Only if you make each character an actor and then index on that will it work, but last I checked, they refused that as well. I'll most likely end up programmatically creating all of my xml files with info that I pull down through their api. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yaksplat 58 Posted October 12, 2013 Author Share Posted October 12, 2013 It's possible that I could make each subfolder a season and then handle it that way, so season 1 is bugs, 2 daffy and so on and so forth with the appropriate xml in there so everything looks the same really. It sounds like then it would properly mesh with MBT. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke 37010 Posted October 12, 2013 Share Posted October 12, 2013 Why not this way? http://thetvdb.com/?tab=series&id=72514&lid=7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke 37010 Posted October 12, 2013 Share Posted October 12, 2013 Fair enough, but it's still important to have a standard, even if it's not the one you would have chosen. As long as we have rich metadata on a per-episode level, then the folder organization is not important and it's the ui's responsibility to present it to you in the manner of your choosing. Massaging the data (folders) to influence the display is the MB2 way of doing it. What I'm saying is, let's just have one standard, and then the display can use the data to show it to you how you want to see it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yaksplat 58 Posted October 12, 2013 Author Share Posted October 12, 2013 So, what is the optimal way? Is it editing the xml file contained in the metadata folder? Taking my situation as an example where the organizational data from thetvdb is not in a manner in which i'd like to use, but the per episode data is good, what would you personally do to make a specific episode easy enough to find for a 7 year old. I ask that because that's who my main user is in this case. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke 37010 Posted October 12, 2013 Share Posted October 12, 2013 This one is tricky because it's animated. Normally I would say use cast metadata. For instance, you can go to the cast tab, click an actor, then see all episodes that actor appears in. Since this is animated, that won't work. It would be interesting if we could get metadata on show characters. I wish we could do that. In any event, I think that's the right approach, but since that's probably not great for a 7 year old, I guess you could split it out into distinct series for each character. Kind of like what you had before, except where the looney tunes parent folder is not the series, it's just a plain folder. You'll have to manually fix the series tvdb id's in order to do something like that. But this way at least the series structure can be honored. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnchimpo 7 Posted October 12, 2013 Share Posted October 12, 2013 This one is tricky because it's animated. Normally I would say use cast metadata. For instance, you can go to the cast tab, click an actor, then see all episodes that actor appears in. Since this is animated, that won't work. It would be interesting if we could get metadata on show characters. I wish we could do that. In any event, I think that's the right approach, but since that's probably not great for a 7 year old, I guess you could split it out into distinct series for each character. Kind of like what you had before, except where the looney tunes parent folder is not the series, it's just a plain folder. You'll have to manually fix the series tvdb id's in order to do something like that. But this way at least the series structure can be honored. I'm just spitballing here, but could he disable cast member metadata and add the "castmember" (Daffy, Bugs Bunny, etc.) manually. Then add that "castmember" as a favorite and then the user could select that actor from the favorites screen? Don't know if any of that is possible, but its a thought. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steve1977 67 Posted October 19, 2013 Share Posted October 19, 2013 I assume that this is only relevant for one of your shows, which has even been finished. So, why not make all changes manually in the web GUI of MBS and then "lock" the whole show that it doesn't get auto-updated. If I recall there is a button that prevents the show from being updated? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yaksplat 58 Posted October 19, 2013 Author Share Posted October 19, 2013 I did stumble across that yesterday and I meant to ask if that could be a possible solution and I think it might be. When the metadata is edited in that form, is it reading and writing to the xml file in the metadata folder? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pagali 62 Posted October 19, 2013 Share Posted October 19, 2013 Doesn't this subject really apply to the MB Server more than MBT? Why would MBT handle it any differently than MBC or any other client? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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