Now you at the beginning of a journey to learn about View Creation, Editing, Sorting, and Displaying.
First, the Theatre View menu structure and views are shown under Options>Theatre View>Items To Show. Take a look at how the default ones are set up, and experiment with them from there. Back up your library before you make changes. There are articles in the Wiki about Views, and there are many threads on the topic, many about achieving specific results.
Search is your friend.
Do note that MC doesn't like to have its Theatre View menu items renamed, particularly the top level menus, as the names, or at least some of them, are basically hard coded in the program to have certain functionality. For example in the Options>Startup>Startup Interface>Location setting, the original names of the top level menus are always shown. If you rename the "Video" menu item to "Videos" and set the startup location to "Video" you will get unexpected results. Another example is the
Media Center Core Command 22001, which allows you to use a command to jump to a particular top level menu in Theatre View, uses the original menu names.
I have tended to leave the original menu names in place on my HTPC, but have added things like "Recorded TV", "TV Favourites" and "TV Stations" under the default top level "Video" menu. I have also changed the way some of the default views work, to change the record selection, sorting, and display format, for example.
I can understand that it is a pain to wade through lots of TV programs to find something you haven't watched, or the series you are currently interested in watching, or watched last night but can't remember its name, and so on. That is why I have set up a "TV Favourites" view, which uses a library field I added called "Favourite TV", for which there can be only one value for each TV Series. So now, if I want to make a TV Series one that I watch regularly, I ticked the "Favourite TV" checkbox, and all of the episodes of that favourite series show up in my custom view, sorted by Series>Season>Episode, like the default "Shows" view. It sorts the wheat from the chaff for me. You could do anything similar like creating a "Wife's TV" view with all her favourite shows. "Sport TV" view, and so on. I also have a view that only programs that have been recorded, and not shows that I have obtained otherwise. You should also learn to use the "Recent" view at the top of the default "Shows" sub-menu, as well as the "Genre" and "Series" views.
Note that all media that has been watched is supposed to get a tick next to it in Theatre View, which is based on the [Number Plays] tag, but sometimes if you have a long recording with lots of padding, or don't watch to the end, it doesn't get set correctly. There is still room for improvement in this area. But there are also methods to improve how MC does this yourself. Glynor, one of the more prolific and knowledgeable user on the forum,
wrote up how he improved the watched flag on his system.
So, get searching, reading, working out what you want to achieve, and if you can't work out how to do it yourself, come back and ask. A bunch of people around here like a challenge!
PS: If you do come back to ask, it is a good idea to start a new thread with an appropriate title, rather than ask new questions that bare no relationship to the title of this thread. Otherwise interested users may skip over your thread, or miss your post entirely.
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Topic: Movie & TV show import problems (Read 3700 times)