[mythtv-users] Organizing Video collection

[C.T. Paterson]

2009/6/10 Nasa <nasa01 at comcast.net>:
>
>> That said, mythtv offers many things to help organize
>> videos/recordings -- this includes VideoGroups, StorageGroups,
>> Categories (limited to 1 per video file), and Genres(can have multiple
>> per video file and should be automagically filled when vidoe metadata
>> is downloaded).  I just can't figure out how best to use all these
>> options.
>>
>> So that said...  How do people use these tools to organize thier video
>> collection?
>>
> So,
>
> Am I the only one that doesn't get all this?  Can no one clear this up for those
> of us who are fairly slow....

I reserved comment only because I'm not an expert - but as misery
loves company...

I've got about 200ish movies, and several hundred episodes of television.

I mainly use directories to do my organizing.  Under
/var/lib/mythtv/videos, I have Features, Recorded_Movies (ie. recorded
from TV), Television, Home_Movies, Podcasts, etc.  Of those,
Television is the only one with any number of subdirectories (by show,
of course), and most shows are broken up by season/series.

I haven't really done much in terms of categorizing the movies, except
to group the family-friendly stuff together to make it easier for my
daughter to access her stuff (if you're old enough to get yourself up
at 6am, you're old enough to start your own movie).

I have recently, like within the last couple of weeks, started using
the categories within the video manager - but it was more about
breaking up all the material into managable chunks within the manager,
than to change how the media was browsed for playback.

I've occasionally thought that I might use tags, rather than
categories to browse my playback and that without tags I could
accomplish the same with softlinks within the videos directory
structure (as you've done); so a movie could fall within "Action" and
"Sci-Fi", for example.  That being said - I've never bothered, so for
my uses it's really a solution in search of a problem.

Cheers.

-- 
"My country is the world, and my religion is to do good."
                                        -- Thomas Paine