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More => Old Versions => Media Center 16 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: wer on June 07, 2011, 12:52:42 pm

Title: Can't avoid sorting of playlists in Theater mode
Post by: wer on June 07, 2011, 12:52:42 pm

I'm running MC16 on my HTPC, so Theater Mode is really all-important for me.

I've created some playlists, and I've manually arranged the songs in them in the arbitrary order I want.

If I access them through the "Playlists" root menu in Theater mode, that works fine.

But I want Audio playlists grouped with my audio, not under a separate menu.  Luckily MC makes that easy: (sort of, since it won't let me move the main Playlists item into Audio) I created a new view for Theater mode under Audio and configured it to show the appropriate playlist group.  Perfect.

The problem is, when I view a playlist in this manner, Media Center INSISTS on sorting it.  Even if I set "Modify Results" to "NO MODIFICATION" it sorts by album.  Telling it to sort by "Seq" has no effect.

Is there any way to get it to just play in the order from the playlist?  (I don't understand why the ability to add a view of playlists would be granted, but without the ability to process the playlists in the order they were intended.)

Thanks very much for any help!

Title: Re: Can't avoid sorting of playlists in Theater mode
Post by: Matt on June 07, 2011, 04:46:01 pm

In a coming build:
Changed: When viewing a playlist using a library view, the order of the playlist will be preserved when possible in Theater View views.

Title: Re: Can't avoid sorting of playlists in Theater mode
Post by: Matt on June 07, 2011, 05:08:02 pm

I should add that there are some technical complications to this, so I'm not sure if it'll always do what you want as you add complexity to a view.

The reason is that library views are built around searches.  Searches take a set of input files, and evaluate them against a stack of rules.

This process is not conducive to specific rules expecting some order since the order is defined by the input files and other rules in the stack.


You could also add a 'Playlists' item to Theater View and pick your playlist group as the root.  This item will not be a library view.  That means you would need to put it at the root or group it under 'Audio' like 'Netflix', etc. do under 'Video' by default.

Title: Re: Can't avoid sorting of playlists in Theater mode
Post by: wer on June 07, 2011, 07:01:10 pm

Awesome, Matt!  Thank you very much for fixing this!

I don't intend to make this view complicated at all:
  1. Create blank view
  2. Configure view to show playlist group
  3. Sort: no sorting

It will show me an icon view of every playlist in the group, and when I go into each one, the tracks will be in "playlist order".

If it does that I'll be happy as a clam, no further complications required.

I can understand why it was doing it that way previously... The view returned a list of items in a playlist, but then displayed them according to the file tags, but the file tags had no info on the playlist order...

Thanks a lot!   ;D