<br>This posting is inspired by the "RANT: MythTV has a *horrible* end user experience." thread.<br><br>I would like to focus on the MythVideo UI, specifically the various library views: "Browser", "Gallery" and "Listing". It is my opinion that none of these views allow the user to easily navigate through a large collection of video files.<br>
<br>MythVideo is missing a view which is cross between Browser View and Gallery View. It would take visual cues from Gallery View in that it would present content in a hierarchical tree of virtual folders, but this tree would be based on classification of files by videocategory, genre, ... rather than physical placement on the hard drive. Perhaps this could be called Category View or Navigation View.<br>
<br>In many ways Browser View works fine, with the ability to filter to different categories, genres and the like, and set those filters as the default view. The problem is that these filters require many slow steps to change and it is not obvious to the occasional user that the list of items in the default view is only a subset of all available items.<br>
<br>Here is a more detailed description of my proposal:<br><br>In the Setup for the Category View the user would be allowed to specify the groupings which are to be used in the hierarchical presentation. This would be similar to the "Group By" setting in Amarok, where the user is offered to specify "Artist/Album", "Genre/Artist", "Genre/Artist/Album", etc. In the Classification View setup the user would optionally select items in the "Filter Video List", for example to group first by Category and then by Genre. The filter items would be picked from "Not used", "First", "Second", ...<br>
<br>At the top level, a user who had selected Category first, Genre second would see a virtual folder of all his categories, e.g. "Movies", "Documentaries", "SitComs", "Children's", ... Entering Movies he might see see Action, Adventure, ... (Of course, if you don't have any adventure movies you would not get an Adventure folder in Movies). Finally, once the user had reached the bottom level, he would be presented with a view identical to the current Browser View.<br>
<br>The user-definable category items could also have a built-in hierarchy character. For example, you might have a "SitCom" category and "SitCom/Friends" and "SitCom/Seinfeld" categories with a logical effect, but the SQL query for this feature might be a little bit tricky.<br>
<br>In a way, this is just like Browser View except instead of a default filter setting the user has selected which of the filter items are important to his presentation of the library and letting the user *navigate* through those items to his content of choice.<br>
<br>I understand that the Gallery View could be made to work like this if files are properly organized in folders on the hard drive. However, for many of us this will be hard to do, for example, many of us have more videos than fit on a single hard disk. Also, moving files around on the hard-drive can be difficult once they are in the MythVideo database.<br>
<br>As an aside, I think it would be nice to be able to play a Random item. Lets say that want to watch a random Documentary. I navigate to Documentary and select Random play. Or I can go to Movie, Comedy and press Random.<br>
<br>Thanks for your efforts.<br><br>