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[BartMan01]

Looking to see if anyone has come up with a good solution to this yet since I haven't seen any changes to the product to address this. I have views that contain multiple media types, like a 'Children' view that contains everything for the kids. It has a mix of content including movies, educational DVDs, music video content, shorts (Pixar), test clips, web clips, and TV shows.

I don't want to make the first filter be some type of 'what type of content' filter because then it just confuses things for the intended users. However, if I make the main view level anything other than 'series' then series cover art does not show. If I do make it 'series' then I get all series content listed followed by an 'unassigned' entry with everything else.

The only work around I have found is to give everything a 'Series' tag whether it is a series or not (so the movie 'Bambi' also needs to be in the series 'Bambi').

Any other good solutions for this?
Anything on the radar from JRiver to address this (I know it has come up before)?

[blgentry]

I've tried a few things just now to see how they would work, and none are very good.  I'm doing this in Standard View.  I'm guessing you really want this in Theater View though right?  Or JRemote?  I think various solutions will be slightly different depending on the target view method.

Series cover art seems to be special.  It seemingly won't show even when doing something like firstnotempty([Series],[Name]) .

Hopefully the clever people here will have some good suggestions or solutions.

Brian.

[BartMan01]

So I guess the lack of response means there is still no way to do this. I will stick to making everything a 'series', which means I will have to add a custom tag to keep track of what things are actually in a series vs those that I just made that way so it would display properly.

[RD James]

Season artwork has the same problem.
I wanted to use "Delimit([Season], , Season/ )" as a grouping for my TV shows instead of [Season] because then you get a nicely formatted header, but then the artwork disappears.

[blgentry]

Season artwork has the same problem.
I wanted to use "Delimit([Season], , Season/ )" as a grouping for my TV shows instead of [Season] because then you get a nicely formatted header, but then the artwork disappears.

What kind of view are you trying to use?  If you do a Categories view with Series, then Season, you'll get art at each stage of drill down and you can customize the thumbnail text to show whatever you want at each stage, and keep the artwork.  Are you using Panes, or Categories, or ... ?

Brian.

[RD James]

It's a category view which only uses TVInfo(SeriesDisplay)
Then the files inside the category are grouped by [Season]
 
If they're grouped by anything other than [Season] the season artwork is replaced by the thumbnail for the first episode.

[BartMan01]

It's a category view which only uses TVInfo(SeriesDisplay)
Then the files inside the category are grouped by [Season]
 
If they're grouped by anything other than [Season] the season artwork is replaced by the thumbnail for the first episode.

From everything I have seen, anything other that [Series] or [Season] directly doesn't work. Using them inside a calculation to pretty things up or to show another field if that one is not populated breaks the display of artwork.

[Hendrik]

Using TVInfo(SeriesDisplay) or TVInfo(SeasonDisplay) definitely works, thats what my views use.
Any other expressions are however problematic, since its not really clear to what their result will be.

The coverart mode is determined by the view itself, not by what a particular entry in a view might represent, as such a mixed view that shows both TV series and anything else will likely not be able to show you Series cover art, unless you somehow assign series tags to those other entries and still group by that (and only that).

Note that you can override the "Expression to Display" to your liking, just the "Expression to Group by" has to remain one of the ones mentioned above, as appropriate.
My Season expression for example adds the show name to the output as well, so it says "Show - Season 1" (well with a new line instead of a dash), and season covers still work since thats only  the display expression.

[RD James]

Using TVInfo(SeriesDisplay) or TVInfo(SeasonDisplay) definitely works, thats what my views use.
Any other expressions are however problematic, since its not really clear to what their result will be.

The coverart mode is determined by the view itself, not by what a particular entry in a view might represent, as such a mixed view that shows both TV series and anything else will likely not be able to show you Series cover art, unless you somehow assign series tags to those other entries and still group by that (and only that).

Note that you can override the "Expression to Display" to your liking, just the "Expression to Group by" has to remain one of the ones mentioned above, as appropriate.
My Season expression for example adds the show name to the output as well, so it says "Show - Season 1" (well with a new line instead of a dash), and season covers still work since thats only  the display expression.

You can only set up views like that in Theater View, not Standard View.
There's no option to group by an expression and then display using another in a Standard View list.
You can set up a category like that, but it doesn't seem to work there either, and that doesn't help with grouping the list of episodes.

I set up two views showing the problem.
1. Upper pane categorized by [Season], lower pane grouped by [Season]
2. Upper pane categorized by an expression grouping with [Season] and displaying TVInfo(SeasonDisplay), lower pane grouped by TVInfo(SeasonDisplay)

For my views, I don't want multiple categories being used.
With a single category, double-clicking a series brings up a list of all the episodes.
With multiple categories double-clicking a series drills down into additional views (like the ones pictured) which I don't like.
That's good for Theater View navigation with a remote, but a list is better for Standard View navigation with a mouse.

[BartMan01]

We are kind of stuck in MC with archaic categories of media like 'TV' or 'Movie' in the overall scheme of things but media today comes from many different sources and putting things in 'source' buckets doesn't really make sense anymore (especially to the younger group). We can build views that aggregate content by type instead of original source but then we lose important UI functionality like artwork display.

When you go to your Netflix or Amazon queue for example, there are not separate queues for TV vs Movie vs whatever else, everything in your watch list is intermingled and when you drill down what you see varies as needed.

The logic would be pretty straight forward - if the series/season tag is populated and you are at that level in drill down then display that artwork instead of the 'fan'. How hard it would be to implement at this point I can't speak to.

This could be an area of differentiation for MC because it seems like everyone else is stuck in the same old fashioned place from a design standpoint. Everything has to be categorized in separate views as 'Movie', 'TV' or 'Home Movie' in other programs too. I have played with several other programs (Plex, Synology Video Server, etc.) in an effort to work around the fact that JRiver still doesn't have an iOS app that can cache content on the device and they all suffer from the same thing. Media has to be broken out by 'where it came from' as opposed to what it is.

[blgentry]

Thanks for the info.  I see what you are trying to do now and just spent 15 minutes playing with it.  I believe I have come to the same conclusions you have regarding display in this exact method you have outlined.

For my views, I don't want multiple categories being used.
With a single category, double-clicking a series brings up a list of all the episodes.
With multiple categories double-clicking a series drills down into additional views (like the ones pictured) which I don't like.
That's good for Theater View navigation with a remote, but a list is better for Standard View navigation with a mouse.

I guess I can mostly agree with all of that.  I was going to wonder aloud why you don't just use several categories and drill down.  Then I looked at the way I have TV set up on my system in standard view.  I use Panes.  So it's "one level", just like yours.  Except that I have multiple panes to click on, which makes it fast and easy.  I don't get any series or season cover art, but I kinda don't care.  The whole idea of panes is speed for finding what I want and it excels at that.  I also like having a thumbnail for each episode, as opposed to just a text listing.  Not sure why; I guess it just looks a little nicer to see thumbnails of the episodes, instead of just a line of text.

My Panes view is even faster because I have a "watched or not" pane.  So I just click on "not watched" and it hides every episode I've seen.  Which largely means that I don't even need to choose a season.  The next episode is just always right there at the top of the list waiting for me.

You seem extremely specific about what you want down to very small details, so I won't even suggest that you try a panes view. 

Brian.

[BartMan01]

I use Panes.  So it's "one level", just like yours.  Except that I have multiple panes to click on, which makes it fast and easy. 

To follow up on the general comments in your post, I too use panes for searching for media in the main UI and agree with your comments for that use. I use the main UI for library maintenance only though, the usual 'end user' interface is sitting on the couch with a remote and using Theater View.