Filter request

Perhaps we could get an "Incomplete" filter. returns any results with empty areas, fanart, posters. This might let you get rid of the missing fanart/poster options from the drop down list.

Cheers
Paybac

Just answered your bug report first, the missing posters and fanart will be added to the filters soon. Although my biggest concern is speed and responsiveness of MC, at the moment the filters work very fast, but checking for missing posters and fanart is very slow in comparison, as would be checking for any missing field, this would mean that the nfo's need to be fully loaded and checked individual (A process that normally occurs only for a single movie when it is selected), at the moment the filters work very fast, checking each nfo for any missing or empty fields would be considerably slower.

I could add additional information to the cache, missing posters and fanart would only need a boolean so take little resources, but for the nfo data, the cache would need to hold the full contents of each nfo file and i'm not certain of the effect that this would have on the already large overhead. I'll have to experiment a little.

The other option would be to tag the nfo when it is created that some data is missing......


This however will not account for manual editing of the nfo outside of MC, but perhaps as a matter of course when an nfo is loaded in MC & found to be complete/incomplete the tag is updated accordingly....

To list incompletes would just be a matter of listing those tagged incomplete....

StormyKnight wrote:

This however will not account for manual editing of the nfo outside of MC, but perhaps as a matter of course when an nfo is loaded in MC & found to be complete/incomplete the tag is updated accordingly

I'm not overly concerned about that, one of the weaknesses of MC's system is that most of the information can be edited outside of MC, this does not effect the browser, since all the info from the selected .nfo file is reloaded when a single item is selected, but it does effect the filters and sortorder, which depend on the cache being up-to-date. The only workaround I could think of is the rebuild movie db. In an ideal world the rebuild would happen at program startup, but this meant excessive loading time for people with lots of media. The cache is a compromise between speed and accuracy since it will not reflect manual changes to the nfo. In my case this is not an issue since I use MC for editing purposes.

This is true Billy, anyone manually editing the nfo's would also know about the MC cache mechanism & the rebuild movies option, so yes i don't see it as a hinderance in the scheme of things.

So do you think having a xml tag to indicate an incomplete nfo will work & be the most efficient method?

If so rather than the tag just saying complete/incomplete it perhaps could hold more detail about what was missing, perhaps some sort of binary code so that you could sort by missing poster or missing plot etc etc

as an example with only 4 items..

bit 1 would indicate the status of outline
bit 2 would indicate the status of plot
bit 3 would indicate the status of rating
bit 4 would indicate the status of poster

1111 would indicate 4 predefined items were complete
0001 would indicate only the first predefined item was complete, the other three are missing.

This code could be cached without much additional overhead I would think.

Then in the batch rescrape wizard, you could have an 'auto' setting - it would use the complete/incomplete tag info to try & find the missing information & only the missing information.

Cheers

This kind of falls in line with the tag creation for the tvshow.nfo as well - To have a tag(s) that shows a TV Show has all the episodes and doens't need further scraping. I know my collections has about half (or more) shows that are complete/done.

In the update for november 18, Billy mentioned...

For tv shows there are has only been a single change to date, that is the addition of a locked button on the tv show page. This gives users the ability to lock completed shows so that when searching for new episodes they are ignored.

Is this want you mean?

StormyKnight wrote:

This is true Billy, anyone manually editing the nfo's would also know about the MC cache mechanism & the rebuild movies option, so yes i don't see it as a hinderance in the scheme of things.

So do you think having a xml tag to indicate an incomplete nfo will work & be the most efficient method?

If so rather than the tag just saying complete/incomplete it perhaps could hold more detail about what was missing, perhaps some sort of binary code so that you could sort by missing poster or missing plot etc etc

as an example with only 4 items..

bit 1 would indicate the status of outline
bit 2 would indicate the status of plot
bit 3 would indicate the status of rating
bit 4 would indicate the status of poster

1111 would indicate 4 predefined items were complete
0001 would indicate only the first predefined item was complete, the other three are missing.

This code could be cached without much additional overhead I would think.

Then in the batch rescrape wizard, you could have an 'auto' setting - it would use the complete/incomplete tag info to try & find the missing information & only the missing information.

Cheers

Thats a good idea, not sure why I never thought of it since I already use similar for one or two preferences. A single byte per movie would certainly have little impact on the overhead.

billyad2000 wrote:

StormyKnight wrote:

This is true Billy, anyone manually editing the nfo's would also know about the MC cache mechanism & the rebuild movies option, so yes i don't see it as a hinderance in the scheme of things.

So do you think having a xml tag to indicate an incomplete nfo will work & be the most efficient method?

If so rather than the tag just saying complete/incomplete it perhaps could hold more detail about what was missing, perhaps some sort of binary code so that you could sort by missing poster or missing plot etc etc

as an example with only 4 items..

bit 1 would indicate the status of outline
bit 2 would indicate the status of plot
bit 3 would indicate the status of rating
bit 4 would indicate the status of poster

1111 would indicate 4 predefined items were complete
0001 would indicate only the first predefined item was complete, the other three are missing.

This code could be cached without much additional overhead I would think.

Then in the batch rescrape wizard, you could have an 'auto' setting - it would use the complete/incomplete tag info to try & find the missing information & only the missing information.

Cheers

Thats a good idea, not sure why I never thought of it since I already use similar for one or two preferences. A single byte per movie would certainly have little impact on the overhead.

I think this would actually increase the speed dramatically. The gain far outways the minimal overhead - and seems simple enough to implement (this coming from a non-programmer of course)

Wizerd wrote:

I think this would actually increase the speed dramatically. The gain far outways the minimal overhead - and seems simple enough to implement (this coming from a non-programmer of course)

The implementation is not an issue, done a quick outline today, the only real issue is real estate.

At the moment their is space for 30 filters below the movie list.

The problem is that there are 23 IMDB genres. From the next build users can customize this list and add extra tags. Then there is the other special tags such as watched, unwatched, duplicates, top250, problem etc. Ideally I would add even more tags, such missing fanart, missing posters, missing plot etc.

The obvious solution would be to add some of these filters to the menu, like for the missing fanart and posters. With them intergrated into the filter engine and using bit masking then all of these filters would be very fast. But how does the program show that a filter has been applied. With the checked listbox users can see at a glance. I'm not so sure about having filters out of site would be a good idea.

Ok just as an idea....

Where you currently have the movie genres, replace that section with a expandable list similar to how the TV Shows are presented.

Perhaps hey can be listed such as...

+IMDB Genre (the current 23 genres)
+IMDB Other (the top250 etc)
-Watched
....Watched
....Unwatched
-MC Filters (Missing NFO components)
....Mising Fanart
....Missing Poster
....Missing Rating
.......etc

Now each of these sub components needs to be selectable. Either a checkbox or directly clicked. Once selected they turn red for example & so does the related top level heading.

i.e. If missing Rating is selected, both missing rating & MC Filters show as red. That way if MC Filters is colapsed, you can still locate a filter that is still active.

In addition, I think this will not take up any more room when colapsed, & when expanded a scroll bar could be used.

Also, it may be warrented to be able to have multiple selections at once.....

I think this will help with the ever expanding filters issue, the space contraits & being able to identify if a filter is active. A reset all filters button will also need to be somewhere although it could conceivably be the first in the list.

I also see that these lists can have a context menu, perhaps that can be used in some way - perhaps clear this arms filters or something along those lines...

Cheers

StormyKnight wrote:

Ok just as an idea....

Where you currently have the movie genres, replace that section with a expandable list similar to how the TV Shows are presented.

Perhaps hey can be listed such as...

+IMDB Genre (the current 23 genres)
+IMDB Other (the top250 etc)
-Watched
....Watched
....Unwatched
-MC Filters (Missing NFO components)
....Mising Fanart
....Missing Poster
....Missing Rating
.......etc

So you would like a drop down, checked treeview. This is not going to happen soon, I haven't even looked at creating custom controls yet, maybe a challenge for another day.
Perhaps the whole of the genre system could be within a context menu, that can have heirarchy and checkboxes.

Hey Billy I'm happy with what ever you decide! I'll float the ideas that come to me, but in the end you will have to determine thier merit especially when you having a better understanding of the programming involved.

I just think the extra filters are too important to neglect so yep maybe the context menu is the way to go.

I like stormy's idea but heres a little alternative and maybe easier to implement in the short term.

Drop the movies list down in size from 21 to 17 that should give you room for 15-18 additional genre filters.

Another thing could possibly be combining the "titles containing" and "titles matching" into the one search box with a check box to switch between the two. That would give you even more space possibly to give more space.

That or just ditch the "titles matching" search altogether.


another idea just poped in. Perhaps a bar like the one that splits the search functions and movie info could be inserted between the movie list and the genres search? So then the space taken up by "movies listed" and "genre filters" is user choice.

Or instead of splitting it horizontally perhaps another vertical split could be added that would hold just genres? in a single column it would take up about 3cms of additional space. This would give you extra space in the movie search column which could be used for other things

My 2c
Paybac

paybac wrote:

I like stormy's idea but heres a little alternative and maybe easier to implement in the short term.

Drop the movies list down in size from 21 to 17 that should give you room for 15-18 additional genre filters.

Another thing could possibly be combining the "titles containing" and "titles matching" into the one search box with a check box to switch between the two. That would give you even more space possibly to give more space.

That or just ditch the "titles matching" search altogether.


another idea just poped in. Perhaps a bar like the one that splits the search functions and movie info could be inserted between the movie list and the genres search? So then the space taken up by "movies listed" and "genre filters" is user choice.

Or instead of splitting it horizontally perhaps another vertical split could be added that would hold just genres? in a single column it would take up about 3cms of additional space. This would give you extra space in the movie search column which could be used for other things

My 2c
Paybac

The problem with the movie list is that some people are using MC on netbooks, which only have a vertical resolution of 600, at that size they have far less movies listed than 21.

I do like the idea of the vertical splitter, this would allow a user to choose how much space is given to the filters, i'll implement it for the next build.

Was looking for a way to create a filter on movies missing the Plot field as this makes it annoying after import into IMDB. Normally the Outline field is at least populated on IMDB if the Plot isn't so I manually copy it across so I at least have something in the Plot field.

Found this thread which steers pretty close to my question

1. Is there a way of defining custom filters? if not, any plans to? Even if it is just to use variables based on existing field names, e.g. 'SHOW WHERE {PLOT} = 0' or similar.
2. Any thought to making an option on movie scrape that checks to see if Plot is blank and if so, copy Outline contents (if exists) to the Plot?
3. Oh, and is there any easy way for me to see which movies in my collection don't have any data in the Plot field?