[mythtv-users] MythVideo: UI suggestion

[Gísli Óttarsson]

This posting is inspired by the "RANT: MythTV has a *horrible* end user
experience." thread.

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.

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.

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.

Here is a more detailed description of my proposal:

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",
...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks for your efforts.
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