Pleas improve alphabetically sorting of file names

[RHR]

Please can you do sorting filnames as Windows does?

An example, how Windows does sorting:
X-Men (2000)
X-Men 2 (2003)
X-Men 3 (2006)

And so Mezzmo does:
X-Men 2 (2003)
X-Men 3 (2006)
X-Men (2000)

For me the Windows method gives the better result.

kind regards
RHR

[Paul]

Thanks for reporting this. We'll look into it and fix it for a future release.

Can you tell me if you see this in Mezzmo or on your DLNA device? And, what DLNA device are you streaming to?

[RHR]

I see this on both Mezzmo and my device.
My device is a WD TV Live.

[Paul]

Thanks for the further information, RHR. We'll check it out.

[RHR]

This behavior is still remaining in Mezzmo 3.0.2.0.
Have you planned this for a future release?

[Paul]

Hi RHR,

Sorry - this has not been implemented yet, but are are looking at sorting issues for the next version and we will include your issue in that development work.

[RHR]

Hi Paul,

You have added a "sort by" selection in version 3.1, but the sorting algorithm itself seems to be still the same. So there is following sorting (sort by title):
X-Men 2 (2003)
X-Men 3 (2006)
X-Men (2000)

if you don't want to change the sorting algorithm in general, is it possible to add a "sorting as operating system" switch to get the following result?
X-Men (2000)
X-Men 2 (2003)
X-Men 3 (2006)

[Coises]

I’d like to add an observation, if I may (not directly related to the original poster’s problem, which seems stranger the more I look at it: parentheses normally sort before numerals, so the results he describes wouldn’t come just from using a “dumb” sort):

No algorithm will get sorting right all the time. There are problems that can’t be resolved without understanding the meaning of what you are sorting (on top of the already maddening difficulties in sorting for most languages with character sets broader than US-ASCII).

One of the main reasons I chose Mezzmo is that I can let it do a lot of the work of retrieving movie and TV show data for me, yet I still can fix what it doesn’t get right. Most other media servers I tested either did everything and left me no way to override, or made me do everything, or made me choose one way or the other to apply to everything.

Experience has convinced me that the only way to get sorting of titles, names and the like right consistently is to have separate xxx-display and xxx-sort fields, with the sort field taking a reasonable default based on the display field. That way the person maintaining the library can fix what doesn’t sort correctly according to whatever algorithm computes the default sort. For example: I would want to see 3 Women, ¡Three Amigos! and Three Days of the Condor displayed, as those are the correctly-styled titles; but I would expect all three to sort under “Three...”: someone looking for a movie shouldn’t have to remember how the title is styled to find it!

I give files names like
Sessions The.mp4 so the sort will be correct in the folder (e.g., when accessed from another computer using a network share); then I sort on file name in Mezzmo and fetch data manually when Mezzmo can’t find it (which seems always to be the case for titles with a leading “The” moved to the end.) I use the double blank because a comma will screw up sorting: e.g.,
Sessions, The would sort after
Sessions at West 54th because commas sort after blanks. (The periods before file extensions can also screw up sorting.)

My point is just to request that you be wary of trying to fix this with some form of “smart” sort: experience tells me it will never be smart enough. Algorithms can do better than Mezzmo does now, but only allowing the user to override the sort keys corresponding to each sortable text field will solve it completely.

[Paul]

RHR: Sorry, we have not tweaked the sorting algorithm as yet. It's still on our plans for improvement.

Coises: Excellent analysis. We share your thoughts. Sorting folders, playlists, files & titles (for everyone's needs) is a hard task to get right and to keep it easy-to-use. We're still considering the best way to present it for Mezzmo users. If you know of a nice solution in another software product, let us know and we'll review it.