It's been asked for a few times before, by a variety of users, but it's really starting to become completely unmanageable for me. Right now, I subscribe to 39 different podcasts (some auto-download and others don't), and MC doesn't have any way to group these at all, which is starting to make it
really annoying to navigate through them and use them on my HTPC. Its to the point where I'm considering moving to another Podcast viewer/reader, but I don't really want to do that at all. However, since starting to use them, I'm really finding that I'm watching them even more often on my HTPC than I'm using my TiVO functions, especially for certain "genres" of content. Why record Meet The Press on Sunday morning when I can just watch the podcast? I don't care when watching Meet the Press or the Nightly News or DL.TV that it's a little more blocky than a pristine MPEG-2 cable recording would be! I imagine that 39 figure is only going to grow, and I actually find myself holding back a little when I might want to check out a show I stumble on now out of fear of increasing the complexity...
As is, at 1024x768, I have three full "pages" of podcasts showing in the tree (and still two full "pages" if the AW is minimized). Plus, even though these are often of wildly differing "genres", they are all grouped together and there's no way to organize them other than by name. The simple ability to create "groupings" for them, like we can with essentially every other "asset" in MC, would easily solve the issue. I'd simply group them by Genres: news, politics, technology, science, humor, fun, etc.
For me (and for now) simple "playlist group" style dumb groupings would suffice. I could do my groupings and manage them manually. Though, if you want, another route would be to allow us to define full-fledged view schemes of Podcasts (treat them like a new [Media Type]) and allow us to add Panes based on tags we add, such as: [Genre], [Artist], [Corporation] (I have a custom one for other purposes), etc. There are a few other things that MC's podcast support really could use -- queue management, download progress "home page", more customizable "keep until" options, and other things mentioned before -- but I really think this is the number one issue to make it more manageable.
The other big thing I'd really like a LOT would be a new Home Page item in Theater View that would let us navigate our Podcasts just like any other media in MC. Podcasts, especially video podcasts, are PERFECT for the HTPC usage case of Theater View. It baffles me that I have to go to Standard View on my HTPC to navigate through my Podcasts. I know I can have the auto-downloaded ones show up in my regular audio/video trees (and I do), but this only works for the "episodes" that have already downloaded and there is no access to descriptive info at all, so it's of limited use.
These two things alone, at least the groupings of which seems easy enough to implement, would vastly improve MCs handling of Podcasts, and really make it "a cut above".
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Topic: Organizing Podcasts (Grouping) and Theater View (Read 1347 times)