The problem I run into is that I like each of these but once someone picks a year or actor, should they just be shown a list of movies (Name)? Or should they then (or prior-to) get genre to narrow it down? It's tough because there are so many combinations of fields to select on.
In Standard View, I use a "Panes and Details" scheme—for this very reason. I can include a pane for any category that interests me, and quickly select any combination of criteria. More importantly, I can modify the criteria in any way and see the results instantly. This, of course, just gives me a list. I'm left with the problem of how to actually review the information in detail, as much of it consists of long text and list fields.
In Theater View, there is no equivalent to the functionality provided by Panes in Standard View. We only have a rigid hierarchical navigation system which, you seem to have discovered, just doesn't work for movies. There was much discussion about this and what might be done about it in
Theater View Navigation and
Info Panel.
Are there any other good ones?
Depends what you mean by "good"... Type, rating(s), runtime, moods, tones, studio, screenwriter, composer, country, language, budget, box office, tag line, synopsis, review, video and audio media info. And for series: series title, season, episode. Remember, you're not bound by the standard video fields provided—you can add whatever custom fields you need. In a number of cases, this is necessary even if a standard field is provided—the ones provided are not necessarily the type needed. For example, Genre is a string field, but for movies a list field is required. I append a "." to my custom fields so I can have "Genre." and not confuse it with "Genre" (I'd like to be able to exclude the latter in
Manage Library Fields, but this is not permitted).
There's always "All Genres" as the first pick if the user doesn't want to deal with it once they've selected "Jackie Chan"
That's fine if you're picking something as specific as one actor. For most collections, that one choice is going to result in a short enough list that it doesn't make sense to narrow it any further. But using more general categories (e.g., genre, year, rating), you have make a selection from a number of categories to result in a usable list. Using the current Theater View navigation scheme, we have to make a choice in each category (it might be "all") in the order they occur. To make any changes, we have to "backup" and then redo all the selections. It just doesn't work for movies.
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Topic: What do you tag with DVD movies? (Read 5120 times)