A little push in the right direction

**Mixerguy** · 09-09-2011, 02:00 PM

I'm trying out Mezzmo and a couple other DLNA media servers and I'm liking what I'm seeing so far, but I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out how to accomplish what I fear may be very simple tasks. Fear mostly because I'm sure the solution is much easier than I'm making it out to be and I'm going to look like an idiot when someone points out how painfully uncomplicated it truly is.

Alcohol-induced ramblings aside, I've browsed through a good number of topics that are similar in request, but they haven't quite given me what I needed and was hoping someone could give me a push in the right direction.

Here's the end product I'm looking to accomplish, using just the videos as the example:

Videos
|--- All Videos
|--- Home Videos (containing all Home Video videos)
| |--- 2001
| |--- 2002
| |--- ...
|--- Movies (containing all Movie videos)
| |--- Genre 1
| |--- Genre 2
| |--- Genre ...
|--- Television Shows (containing all Television Show videos)
| |--- Show Name 1 (containing all Show Name 1 videos)
| | |--- Season 1
| | |--- Season 2
| | |--- Season ...
| |--- Show Name 2
| | |--- Season 1
| | |--- Season 2
| | |--- Season ...
| |--- Show Name ...
| | |--- Season 1
| | |--- Season 2
| | |--- Season ...

For ease, let's say the video content for these categories are in X:\HomeVids, X:\Movies, and X:\TVShows, respectively, with no subfolders. That is, all the videos for each category are dumped into one folder for each type video, housed in the root of the drive. TV Show video names are in the format 'Show Name - SxExx - Episode Title', where SxExx is the season and episode. The same type formatting will be applied to the music section which I'd like to get 'foldered' by Artist, then by Album.

Lastly, for reasons too long to go into, the folder structure on the disk has to stay as it is, at least for the time being, so the grouping (somewhat unfortunately) has to occur using intelligent playlists and can't be done at the disk level.

I've tried various forms of using the disk folders and Smart Playlists for the root category playlists/folders, but these objects can't house other playlists/folders. I then tried creating a playlist, adding the folder under it in an attempt to have the parent playlist inheret the objects, then set deny permissions on the folder such that it does not show up when browsing under the parent folder, then creating Active Playlists under the parent to get the subgrouping I was looking for. During these attempts, I also had a hard time filtering out from Active Playlists objects that belonged in other video categories.

As I said at the start, I'm sure I'm missing something painfully obvious and making this out to be vastly harder than it actually is. Could someone please snap me from my ignorance? I've been pounding this for the last few hours and my eyes are swimming.

Thanks and - if any of the devs are around - I'm really enjoying the product aside from this!

Shaun

**Paul** · 09-09-2011, 04:01 PM

Shaun,

I'm glad that you like Mezzmo - thanks!

Unfortunately I don't think that there's an easy way to accomplish what you want at the moment. A future version of Mezzmo will allow basing playlists on other playlists, but creating playlists out of filenames is not a planned feature at this point.

If I understand correctly, you'd want Mezzmo to take a filename like "Show Name - S1E01 - Title" and create one playlist "Show Name" and then place several playlists under it with "Season 1", "Season 2", etc..., each of those containing episodes for that season, right? It certainly is an interesting feature to implement, but it would require some specific naming rules for it to work.

Music is a bit different, because Album and Artist are both meta tags that we can use to create active (or smart) playlists. If season and episode were embedded as meta tags inside the video file, then that would be easier to implement actually.

**Mixerguy** · 09-09-2011, 05:14 PM

Hi Dennis,

Thanks for the information. Glad to know it's just that the features haven't been implemented yet for what I'm looking to do and not that I'm completely inept!

Is an estimated timeline for the playlists-based-off-another-playlist feature available at this point or is it too far out to say with any certainty when it will be added?

Thanks again.

Shaun