Views and Collections ... just madness

[jmos1277 9]

So I’ve been running MediaBrowser3 Server for a while now and it’s absolutely fantastic.  This weekend I had the chance to install and play with MBT for the first time and it raised a few questions.  Why differentiate Views and Collections?  This seems to introduce all kinds of oddities that weren’t present in MB2.  

 

For example, I have defined the following Collections in MB3 Server: Movies, TV Shows, Short Films, Music, and Games.

 

1) When I browse the Movies View, not only do I see the movies from my Movies Collection, but I also see many of the items from my Short Films Collection that just happen to be “movies” (e.g. Pixar shorts).  I would prefer to only see items from my Movies Collection in here.

 

2) When I browse the TV View, not only do I see the shows from my TV Shows Collection, but once again I see many items from my Short Films Collection that just happen to be “TV shows”.  My Short Films Collection is a mixed bag of “movies” and “TV shows”.  I would prefer to only see items from my TV Shows Collection in here.

 

 

I understand that, if I want the behavior that I described above, I can simply browse my Collections.  However, there are a few problems with this.

 

  1) If I browse my media from my Collections I don’t get to use the nice “Next Up” feature for TV shows.  I have really been looking forward to this feature.

 

  2) Additionally, the top strip in the web interface and MBT doesn’t provide links for each of my individual Collections.  It only provides links for Views.  I much prefer the behavior from MB2 where the home screen provided direct links to what we now call Collections.

 

 

So, why the separation of Collections and Views?

 

Why not allow me to define my Views and what is included in each View when I configure my Media Library instead of taking all items that LOOK like movies and putting them into the Movie View?

[Luke 42077]

MB2 was built upon folders. The consensus among our UI developers is that we find that very dull compared to the data driven views you see in MB3. In MB2 every screen looked the same by default and relied on user customization. you might as well be building windows explorer for media if that's the case. Giving a UI developer the freedom to build a view solely designed for movies, solely designed for tv, music, etc, that is much more interesting and powerful and has a much greater chance of spurring creativity. And to that, we're seeing a lot of great new ideas from our developers.

 

A lot of media apps have this type of thing where they have a metadata driven presentation, and also a folder-driven for users that prefer that. So that's basically what we've done.

[Luke 42077]

Take a look at this ipad teaser shot for example. Look at what our designer is able to do given some predictability - movies, music, tv, remote. Look at how nice that looks.  Now imagine instead if you ask him to change his navigation so that it can accommodate any number of user-defined collections. now that takes away from what he wants to do because suddenly the minimalistic nav bar at the bottom is not so minimal anymore.

 

So instead of building generic screens with 20 different settings and saying go design your own layout, we're enlisting the help of people who do this for a living to come up with some really great designs, and bring new ideas to the table.

 

 

[jmos1277 9]

Thanks Luke.  I appreciate your input and everything you've done to advance the MediaBrowser ecosystem.  

 

You make the case for a data-driven architecture rather than a folder-driven architecture.  I absolutely agree with this.  However, when I define a Collection, I do specify the type of data that the Collection contains.  From a technical perspective, all of the information to treat a Collection as a View is already there (i.e. no need for both Views and Collections).  It would seem the stated technical goals could be satisfied by allowing user to specify Views (with the content type) as opposed to Collections and completely ditching the concept of Collections.

 

I do like the clean, minimalistic look of the iPad app.  However, I expect that given 4, 5, or even a dozen different View labels, app designers would find a way to present them cleanly.  Not to mention telling an app designer that there will only ever be 3 or 4 items for which they'll need to present labels seems to limit options for future expandability.  

 

Short Films?  Music Videos?  Home Videos?  etc?  Are all of these media types considered secondary citizens in the MediaBrowser3 ecosystem such that a user must first navigate to a Collections menu and then to one of these secondary categories?

[Luke 42077]

Music videos no - in the web client they are embedded into the music area. That's what I would suggest for the other ui developers but they haven't gotten that far into music yet. Also nobody's saying there can't be a home videos view either, and nobody's saying there has to be a collections menu vs flattening everything out and seeing them all together.  i imagine the designs will continue to evolve.

 

collection types were just introduced fairly recently as a means of resolving conflicts, e.g., how does the system differentiate home movie vs commercial movie, for metadata purposes. We're not really using the types in the presentation. 

 

Using the types in the UI is not as simple as it sounds. In our movie views we like to blend movies, trailers and boxsets together, because they're all movie related. If I design a view to utilize them all but then you split them out into three separate collections, you're going to end up with three views that don't look right, and then you're going to say, make it work both ways so that it looks ok no matter how my collections are setup. And then there's the issue of nested folders. Even if you assign a collection as movies, do we grab all the movies or do we honor the nested folders?

 

And that's too many variables to throw at ui developers. That's one thing we've all learned about recruiting is that if you want to secure commitments, you have to make it at easy as possible for people to step in. So instead of all that it's just, "show me how you would present movies...". 

[Tuxon86 0]

The ability to be able do manage and display your collection was what was good about MB 2.x vs the "one way" approach of XBMC by default. But XBMC does give you the ability to create "smart" playlist and create EHS menu entry point for them even though it's a pain to do..

 

A precision: by "display" I mean being able to discriminate according to an arbitrary genre/category, not how they are presented in the UI and being able to set it so it's the default view.

[pagali 62]

Luke, I understand your philosophy  of allowing a great deal of creativity to your designers. However, you're overlooking the fact that the app is really meant ultimately for your users, not your designers. It should be obvious by now that enough of your users want the choice of whether to use Views or not... or do they want to go directly to their collections, and have the same flexibility within those collections to view by title, latest added, release date, or whatever their choice is. You're locking your users into an arbitrary view that inhibits THEIR creativity.

 

As the earlier poster, jmos1277, said, sometimes users have more than one movie collection for a reason! That's the way they prefer to view their media... so give them that choice. The Roku app, though extremely limited by the Roku interface, allows you the choice of what to see on the first line... Views or Collections... would it be so bad to give your MBT users the same choice?

[pagali 62]

when did i say that wouldn't happen? 

 

I don't know.... when did anybody say it would, or might, happen? I've gotten the impression from every response I've seen that it wasn't on the cards.

[ebr 16169]

All good points Stark.  I will just add the basic philosophy of Mr. Jobs here - sometimes users don't know what they want until you give it to them.

 

What I mean by that is, with these new ways of doing things, you may discover some things you like even better than your current paradigm.  And, if not, we still do strive to keep the control of collection-based browsing available in most of the clients.

[Koleckai Silvestri 1154]

The minimalism of this particular iPad app can be maintained quite easily. 

 

Limit the menu at the bottom to 3 options plus Remote. Allow the end-user to configure those options in the settings. Each option being a view or collection. Then after Remote add a ". . ." menu that gives access to other views and collections per the end-user's settings.

 

Best of both worlds really.  Though it takes a bit more programming on the developer's part.

 

 

Though it might be better in the long run to allow ordering of the menu in the Server and have an API for clients to pull that order. Default would be "Movies, TV, Music, Games Collections, ... ". Where "..." is everything else. The server administrator could choose to replace those four items if they wished. It can still be usable by a remote and touch devices without being cluttered or overbearing.

[Luke 42077]

Our clients all offer collection browsing (or, at least it's planned if not implemented yet). And they all plan to allow you to hide the specialized views if you don't like them.

[ccrocker001 0]

If I want to create a movie view for my son that just shows Pixar movies based on metadata in the database, can I do that currently? If I want to create a view that just shows unwatched commercial movies, can I do that? If I want a view that just shows movies that have the word "Christmas" in the title, genre, or overview can I do that? I don't see how these user defined custom views impact the theme designers. They can all use the same WPF movie view. Seems more like a request to the server to provide the filtered data. To be fair I have not tried the latest release of MBT so maybe this is possible but if not, this is a gating issue for me and a reason I would not move from the current platform I use. Also to be fair, I do not know the coding architecture of MBT or the server to appreciate the ease or the challenges to handle custom views.

[Luke 42077]

when did i say that wouldn't happen? 

[Luke 42077]

If I want to create a movie view for my son that just shows Pixar movies based on metadata in the database, can I do that currently? If I want to create a view that just shows unwatched commercial movies, can I do that? If I want a view that just shows movies that have the word "Christmas" in the title, genre, or overview can I do that? I don't see how these user defined custom views impact the theme designers. They can all use the same WPF movie view. Seems more like a request to the server to provide the filtered data. To be fair I have not tried the latest release of MBT so maybe this is possible but if not, this is a gating issue for me and a reason I would not move from the current platform I use. Also to be fair, I do not know the coding architecture of MBT or the server to appreciate the ease or the challenges to handle custom views.

 

Yes, but using separate user profiles. To have different movie views within the same library, not at the moment.

[Starkadius 219]

Luke, I understand your philosophy  of allowing a great deal of creativity to your designers. However, you're overlooking the fact that the app is really meant ultimately for your users, not your designers. It should be obvious by now that enough of your users want the choice of whether to use Views or not... or do they want to go directly to their collections, and have the same flexibility within those collections to view by title, latest added, release date, or whatever their choice is. You're locking your users into an arbitrary view that inhibits THEIR creativity.

 

As the earlier poster, jmos1277, said, sometimes users have more than one movie collection for a reason! That's the way they prefer to view their media... so give them that choice. The Roku app, though extremely limited by the Roku interface, allows you the choice of what to see on the first line... Views or Collections... would it be so bad to give your MBT users the same choice?

 

I agree with what you are saying, that the app is ultimately meant for users not the designers but I also understand (if I am not mistaken) Luke's viewpoint on this. This is the age old chicken and the egg scenario, if we don't have developers on board supporting the product then we wont have users wanting to use a half-finished or clunky product. If we don't have users using the product then developers are not inclined to support it. So I believe what Luke is trying to do is make MB be very developer friendly by giving them more freedom thus in turn it would be incentive for the developers to continue supporting MB which as well equates to more users coming aboard in the long run.

 

We can't be without developers OR users, there needs to be a middle ground but since this is a fairly new product (still in beta for the most part) it needs to be pushed towards developers first and once it is a polished product we can start giving users what they want. It wouldn't hurt for the developers to throw a bone or two at users which will let them know "Hey they actually listen to us. Wow how very unlike the Plex forum community that ignore everything we ask for." This community is one of the view I have seen where the developers do listen to it's users and I have no complaints. Things will come together in its due time.

Edited December 11, 2013 by Starkadius

[aperry 16]

Yes, but using separate user profiles. To have different movie views within the same library, not at the moment.

 

Can someone walk me through how to do this?  Sorry, first post.  I'm a long time XBMC user, and I've been getting into MB3 recently.  I've been lurking here for a few weeks.  Really looking forward to some of the things I've been reading about (iPad app, Chromecast support, and even a vague reference to PVR).

 

I registered for this same question.  Let's say I have a single folder with 500 movies in it.  I add it as a movie collection, and then I can see both the collection and the automatically created movie "view" in the web interface.  So far so good.  Now, let's say I create a new profile for my kids and I'm interested in a view that shows, for example, all movies that have "family" genre (or maybe a certain tag, or even combination of multiple metadata filters).  I've been playing around in the UI, and it's not immediately obviously how to accomplish this.

 

On a side note, a success story: On a drive back from NYC to Boston I fired up my phone's LTE wifi hotspot, handed a tablet to one of my kids and loaded Frosty the Snowman through the MB3 web interface, streaming from my server at home.  It all worked without a hitch.  Really impressive software.  Thanks!

[swhitmore 781]

Maybe a good feature request would be to add the option to manually exclude collections from views. e.g. If you don't want you short films or home movies ending up in the Movies view, you could manually select it not to be.

[Logos302 86]

aperry: you have two options that I know at this moment.  you can a set the parental control down so it only shows the correct information. IE :  CA-G, but I believe that the Canadian version of what your looking for. or you could setup a library for you kids (in the profile setup of the user) that only has the folder(s) of the movies you want them to have.  IE : \\servername\Movies\kids and only put movies that you want your kinds to have.  

[aperry 16]

aperry: you have two options that I know at this moment.  you can a set the parental control down so it only shows the correct information. IE :  CA-G, but I believe that the Canadian version of what your looking for. or you could setup a library for you kids (in the profile setup of the user) that only has the folder(s) of the movies you want them to have.  IE : \\servername\Movies\kids and only put movies that you want your kinds to have.  

Thanks Logos, I was worried that might be the case.  I suppose I could try to do this with parental controls.  Unfortunately the folders approach wouldn't work for me, without rearranging the folder structure and the process I use to add new media.  That's possible, but I'm nervous what would break because I have other things like XBMC also looking at it.

 

Thanks again for this info.  I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.

[Logos302 86]

It should not break anything.