Modification of Box Set Titles Display

[tonyzarger]

Pauven, I have been a staunch user of MyMovies and Windows Media Center (WMC) for many many years. My MyMovies database has over 4000 titles. During the past 15 years, I have been reviewing all the alternatives to WMC, but not have found anything that would work without having to essentially recreate my movies database. Several months ago I looked again at MMbrowser, now CMC. WOW what an amazing improvement. I was able to migrate my entire database without a lot of additional effort. That is remarkable, and I want to thank you for that.

My situation may be different from others, let me explain. I am not into the internet sharing and don't really care about the web services that MyMovies force you to use. That being said, I use the Box Sets in a way that may be different from others. In addition to using Categories to manage what my children and wife can view, I use Box Sets to create viewing collections based on content and not on Genre. For instance, I have Box Sets for Vampire movies, Werewolf movies, Witches and Warlock movies, Submarine Warfare movies, and exercise movies. Additionally, I create my own Box Sets for our Home videos, Home Photo albums, High School Band Movies, and Wood Working Instructional Videos. The difficulty I am having relates to how you display the disc titles within the Box Sets. The Box Set Disc Title Display is different from the way the Movies Disc Titles are displayed. Because I have Box Sets with more than 300 Disc Titles, scrolling is very, very slow. By the time I scroll down to about the 80th Title, it takes several seconds for each "down arrow" to update the display . And by the time I get to about 300 titles, there are no movies left on the screen. (see attach image).

Would it be possible to display the Box Set Titles using the same code for the main Movies titles? It does not seem to have the delays even when there are over 500 titles.

[Pauven]

Hi Tony,

Thanks for the kind words about CMC.

That is a very unorthodox usage of Box Sets. I recommend you switch to using Custom Categories, this is the correct solution for this, and CMC will display the titles as you desire if you used them.

CMC works fine for both Box Sets and Movie Collections that are reasonable in size, 50+ titles for sure. But it was never designed to handle display of oversized sets like you have created, so there's no surprise it doesn't behave well when challenged in this way.

You can very easily create a Custom Category named "Bugs-Plants-Inanimate Objects" and assign it to 500+ titles. Plus, movies can belong to multiple Categories simultaneously, so you may continue to use it for Parental Restrictions (which fully work in CMC) as well as filtering. You can even filter on multiple Categories simultaneously, use either the OR operator or the AND operator (like Christmas OR Halloween, or Bugs AND Scary).

Side Note: There is an option in Settings > Display Settings > Use Box Sets in all Views, and this is enabled by default. You can turn this off, and if you have created your Box Sets in the correct way (unfortunately, there's more than one way to create Box Sets, some are really bad, you can thank Binnerup for that), then CMC will display the movies inside of the Box Sets as if they were not in the box set. But this only works in certain views. This won't magically solve your issue, you'll still have to implement Custom Categories for grouping, but this may allow you to skip also removing the movies from the Box Sets. Otherwise, in addition to creating the Custom Categories, you'll need to remove the movies from the Box Sets to complete the remediation.

Since there is already a proven solution for what you want to accomplish (Custom Categories) I cannot spend the significant time and effort to recode CMC to create an alternate method for displaying Box Sets, especially for a feature that will only benefit one person. There are a lot of design and feature requests in the queue that will benefit lots of users, yourself included, and I will always choose to work on developing features that benefit the many over those that benefit the one.

Sorry, I hope you understand. And I hope you continue to enjoy using CMC.

-Paul