JRSly wrote:I feel like a total buffoon, but I figure I'll be happier in the long run if I can get this figured out and I'll get over the humiliation eventually.
lol please don't
JRSly wrote:This seems to deliver just the kind of functions I'd want in a media library, flexible organization and sorting! But while there seems to be a lot of discussion about advanced, deep under the hood stuff...I'm having trouble accomplishing the simplest of things. I have zero experience with setting conditions and all that, so all I've managed to do is finally get my movies to display. But it just dumps everything, all my subfolders, into one huge list. Surely, you can instruct the program to display subfolders as they already exist on your drive, right? People haven't been making their own folders through PMS-MLX for every subfolder on their computer? With TV shows, that'd be a nightmare, all those subfolders with more subfolders for each season inside them.
You'll have to think a bit differently while using pms-mlx as opposed to pms. In pms you configure the folders to be shared and every folder existing on your computer will also show as a folder on the ps3. With pms-mlx folders can be created manually (I'll describe the automatic part a bit further down) and will contain files according to the set conditions. Videos have about 50 properties (like width, codec, name, file path etc) with which these conditions can be built. For your example with the subfolders you can e.g. create a folder with the condition 'folder path is <your_folder_path>' and all files contained in this folder will show up. Hope this clarifies the filtering system a bit.
Creating conditions solely based on the folder structure doesn't make much sense, as the same can be accomplished easily with pms; personally I don't use the folder path beside a condition 'folder path does not contain series' to avoid having series showing up where I don't want them to.
To make life a bit easier, when adding a folder (right click on a folder on the tree) there is an option to add auto folders. These will automatically create some folders; e.g. if adding a file system auto folder, a folder on your pc can be selected and it will automatically create the same structure that will show up in pms-mlx. Other folder types are e.g. genre, where a folder will be created for each genre existing in your library.
Last but not least, you can add a file system folder which isn't configurable (yet) and will show your files exactly as pms does. (that's how I show series)
JRSly wrote:Also, I'm really unclear on how you get information about your files into the program for sorting purposes. I've read things like 'query TMDB' but see no way to do that in the program. But then I just saw you state that its implementation in PMS-MLX currently only allows you to rate movies at TMDB, not download information. Is this still the case? Confused.
Since the last release, a plugin system is available, where information can be imported from anywhere. Currently tmdb and imdb are included by default. When importing files, you have to enable plugins and select the ones to use.
In the next release you'll be able to update this from the library view or edit it manually there.
WARNING: I've just recently discovered a bug! When importing files using the 'scan folder' button, plugins aren't being used. You have to create a managed folder for that (will be fixed in next release).
JRSly wrote:I apologize if I've, likely, missed some explanation on these aspects in the thread, I went through the whole thing last night, but it was late and the thread mostly seem filled with, like I said, quite advanced stuff that was way over my head and just confusing me more. It feels like it's just the real gearheads that are getting all the enjoyment, and there's not much help for the complete neophytes. From the folder trees to the cover art....it's so far been a huge hassle just trying to get to the state of the original PMS. I'm terrified of trying to add the actually features that MLX was made for! Maybe I'll come back to it after I take a course on programming...
Hope I could clarify some things for you as I've put quite some time trying to make an interface which isn't too complicated and definitely not intended to be used only by geeks. It's sometimes hard to find the balance between making it customizable and not overcomplicating it. Anyway, I'm always open to suggestions if you think something can be simplified
