Sort Order

[voorhees]

I am working through updating the metadata for my library using BMT. There is one thing I have not figured out if it can be done or not. I was wondering if there is a way to alter the sort order for titles in SageTV based on a provided sort order or method, or do the titles only display based on the title name. For example let’s take the Indian Jones movies (first 3):

Sort order by title:
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Sort order by release date:
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

I would like for SageTV to order them by the second method given a defined sort order provided by the user, thus overriding the title sort order for those three. I was able to do this in MyMovies and was wondering if there is a way in BMT or SageTV. So, I guess the question is (and I may have just missed in the forums and BMT user guide) is there a parameter that can be used to alter the order they are displayed in SageTV to match a provided sort order, or does the title have to be altered to modify the sort order?

Thanks in advance.

[wrems]

Couldn't you alter the metadata tag in BMT to read the order you want so that title works by default:

Indiana Jones 01 Raiders
Indiana Jones 02 TOD
Indiana Jones 03 Last Crusade

May not be exactly what you want but easily doable...

[voorhees]

Originally Posted by wrems

Couldn't you alter the metadata tag in BMT to read the order you want so that title works by default:

Indiana Jones 01 Raiders
Indiana Jones 02 TOD
Indiana Jones 03 Last Crusade

May not be exactly what you want but easily doable...

When you say the metadata tag do you mean the "Fanart Title" and/or the "Media Title"? From what I have noticed it actually just changes the title of the object displayed in SageTV. I know I could alter the title to get it to display the way I wanted, I was just wondering if there was another parameter somewhere else or some other method to force a different sort order so the title of the video did not have to be altered. It is a nice feature in MyMovies and I just wanted to see if there was such a thing with BMT and SageTV. BMT has a great amount of capability and I was just wondering did I miss something somewhere.

Thanks.

[stuckless]

While bmt fetches the metadata, it cannot control how a set of files are sorted and presented by the UI. You can try to alter metadata to make a particular UI sort based on your needs, but other than that, there is nothing that bmt can do.

In order to do what you want, as is, you'd have to change the display title for the movie (not the fanart title), to be something like wrems has specified.

The alternative is to simply put all your Indiana Jones movies in a single folder, and then sort that sub folder by its original air date. That way in the main listing Indiana Jones would show up as a single item (ie a folder) and when you go into that folder, you could then have it sorted by original air date. (original air date is the release date)

[pmpj218]

Could you consider adding a metadata field to BMT called "SortTitle" or something similar? I'm definitely not coming up with this on my own; MyMovies has a SortTitle field that is used in SMM. In a SortTitle field could be added to BMT, it could default to be exactly the same value as "Title" when grabbing metadata, but it can be manually changed.

So for the Indy movies, you could leave the scraped "Title" fields alone, and change the "SortTitles" to:

Indiana Jones 01 Raiders of the Lost Ark
Indiana Jones 02 Temple of Doom
Indiana Jones 03 Last Crusade

This additional field would help keep other movies that I have such as the Aladdin, Alien, Narnia, Mighty Ducks, Resident Evil, and X-Men movies. All those sets of movies have variations to their Titles, that cause them not to sort by their intended sequence. I'm sure it would help out others too.

[stuckless]

You could use the DiscNumber field as an order field.

[pmpj218]

The movies don't have the same Title though, so sorting by DiscNumber wouldn't do much.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by pmpj218

The movies don't have the same Title though, so sorting by DiscNumber wouldn't do much.

Sorry I misunderstood the request, to a degress.

I guess what I thinking is that you could break the title into 3 parts..

Title=Indiana Jones
EpisodeName=Raiders of the Lost Ark
DiscNumber=01

So the titles would actually be the same, and the DiscNumber could be used for sorting.

Either way I was just trying to show an alternative solution why you are waiting for me to add in SortTitle. SortTItle is probably a good idea to add, but to be honest, if I'm going to be mucking with metadata fields, then I'll probably do this along with a few other changes at the same time. I don't know when I'll find the time though

[pmpj218]

Well, I appreciate the alternative solution for now. I probably would just wait for you to add SortTitle, though. I don't like messing with the Title field, because I personally can't get over the fact that the Title is wrong.

I understand you've got a limited amount of time, so i was just hoping you'd take the request and get it in eventually. It would definitely enhance BMT, but as you've shown, there are alternative ways around it for now.

[pmpj218]

I was changing values using the "Edit Raw Metadata" feature, and I realized that EpisodeName corresponds to "Movie Title", which is what is displayed in BMT & the Phoenix UI when browsing titles. So I ended up editing the metadata to this:

EpisodeName: Raiders of the Lost Ark
Title: Indiana Jones 01: Raiders of the Lost Ark

EpisodeName: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Title: Indiana Jones 02: The Temple of Doom

EpisodeName: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Title: Indiana Jones 03: The Last Crusade

I see that videos are sorted by the EpisodeName metadata field if the vfs uses

<sort by="title"/>

This results in Raiders of the Lost Ark sorting with other "R" titles, and the other two sorting with "I" titles.If I change the vfs to

<sort by="metadata">
    <option name="field" value="Title">
</sort>

it sorts by the Title field, and the three Indiana Jones movies show up in order—Raiders, TOD, Last Crusade.

So basically, I just used the Title field as a SortTitle field, and that works. I do have concerns about this being bad form? It looks like the Phoenix UI displays the EpisodeName field for movies, but do you think changing the Title field affects other functionality? I've only had this going since last night, and haven't noticed anything weird yet.