Enhancement: Add Category as an additional grouping/filtering option

[UABEVCUT]

Lean Frontend currently allows browsing by Recording Group. Would it be possible to add Category as an additional grouping/filtering option? Many MythTV installations already have useful Category metadata (News, Sports, Movie, etc.), and exposing Categories would avoid the need to create redundant Recording Groups solely for navigation purposes.

[bennettpeter]

I have made the changes. There is a trial version available for you to test before I release it to the play store.

It is available in "Trial Versions" in the shared folder at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LMf7dTK_fD_e1S3S2HgB1NEPsWI0MdyB

[UABEVCUT]

Nice - listing Categories after Recording Groups works well.

With ~5100 recordings (including a lot of movies), having Categories available helps greatly with navigation.

One additional thought: would it make sense to also show Video categories under the Videos entry in the menu? That way both Recordings and Videos would expose categories in a consistent place.

[bennettpeter]

One additional thought: would it make sense to also show Video categories under the Videos entry in the menu? That way both Recordings and Videos would expose categories in a consistent place.

I thought of that. However, videos do not have a category, they have a list of Genres. There are sometimes five or six values there. I don't know if the first is the major category or how to select one.

You can see the genres if you choose Details on the TV version of leanfront or run a query like this (substitute your own values):

http://backend-ip:6544/Video/GetVideoByFileName?FileName=12 Monkeys/S01E01 Splinter.mkv

For that example I got this list:

<GenreList>
<Genre version="1.0">
<Name>Action</Name>
</Genre>
<Genre version="1.0">
<Name>Adventure</Name>
</Genre>
<Genre version="1.0">
<Name>Drama</Name>
</Genre>
<Genre version="1.0">
<Name>Mystery</Name>
</Genre>
<Genre version="1.0">
<Name>Science Fiction</Name>
</Genre>
<Genre version="1.0">
<Name>Suspense</Name>
</Genre>
<Genre version="1.0">
<Name>Thriller</Name>
</Genre>
</GenreList>

I would classify it as Science Fiction, but it has 7 genres in the list.

It looks like the genres are listed alphbetically, so probably most shows will have "Action" as the first item.

[UABEVCUT]

I did some digging. Videos have a category assigned (videometadata.category in the database), and the Video Service API documentation shows that Category can be updated. However, neither /Video/GetVideoList nor /Video/GetVideoByFileName returns the category value—only the genre list. Since Leanfront uses only the Services API and not direct database access, it looks like there isn't currently a way for the app to retrieve the category assigned to each video.

When browsing by Genre on the MythTV frontend, the same video will be listed under each Genre it is associated with.

I seldom browse by Genre because for instance Comedy has 1843 entries and most are episodes of series such as Parks and Recreation but what I really want is to just find a funny movie to watch.

I placed my series in individual directories which correspond to the categories I created for them. So they are readily accessible in the lean front interface although I have scroll amongst my 1100 movies to get to the desired series directory.

I guess the correct solution would involve getting the MythTV API to export the category information.

[bennettpeter]

I have 1500 videos on my backend. Most of them are movies or TV series with metadata downloaded from thetvdb or themoviedb. On all of the videos the category in the videometadata table is 0, so it seems that perhaps the metadata download does not fill it in. My videocategory table has one entry, "travel", so maybe one video that I had at some time had a category of travel.

Perhaps filtering videos by category will not be useful.

[UABEVCUT]

Since video categories don't seem to be widely used and aren't available through the Services API, I wonder if another navigation option would be to list the top-level directories under Videos. The API already returns the relative FileName, so the first path component could be used as a grouping. I suspect many users organize TV series that way, and it wouldn't depend on database access or metadata.

[bennettpeter]

Tapping "Videos" already gives the top levek video directory list. Duplicating the list in the menu does not seem useful, The menu may get very large this way.

[UABEVCUT]

OK. It looks like the solution on my end is to move the video movies into a separate directory rather than leaving them in the top level directory.