Chick Flicks Lookup

[wrems]

I’m looking for ideas/suggestions about how I can get a more accurate lookup for chick flicks. I made a basic VFS view:

<view name="wr_chick_flicks" label="WR Movies - Chick Flicks">
      <description>Display chick flick related movies</description>
      <view-source name="sagevideoimportsv7" >
            <filter by="pql" value="Genre contains 'Romance' or Genre contains 'Musical' or Genre contains 'Music' or Genre contains 'Drama' and MediaType = 'Movie' and Rated &lt;&gt; 'G'"/>
      </view-source>
      <presentation>
            <sort by="title"> </sort>
      </presentation>
</view>

While this works fairly well there are a number of movies that really don’t belong there for one reason or another. Mostly due to the Drama genre, it’s so nebulous.

Any suggestions or ideas of ways that this can be accomplished? Maybe PQL is not the best way to accomplish this???

[PiX64]

what about adding a custom genre in BMT and sticking all your videos into that genre as well as their original. so your genre maybe would be Chick Flicks. then with PQL you could just pull where genre = chick flicks

[wrems]

I've considered that. The only problem I see is that if BMT or I re-scan the movies, the genre field could be over-written. There's no persistence. If I went through and manually tagged the explicit ones that I wanted to include in my view (which I would do) I would want to be sure that I wouldn't have to do it again...

[PiX64]

yeah thats true. I thought i remembered Sean saying that there was a way to preserve custom metadata fields...but honestly i dont remember 100%

maybe he can chime in here.

[wrems]

I got it!

I put together a pretty good compromise. My initial query provided me a list with about 70% accuracy. For the extraneous ones I built another filter query and excluded IMDBID’s from the initial vfs:

<filter by="pql" value=
"
IMDBID = 'tt0078788' or 
IMDBID = 'tt0081505'
">

So my vfs has a laundry list like above containing all the files I don’t want to see in the lookup. It actually didn’t take more than about 15 minutes to go through the list in BMT and copy and paste the IMDB id’s into my vfs. Now if I ever update the record or bmt updates the record, I should be ok since the IMDB id will stay the same.

It works well and I figure that once in a while I’ll have to eyeball the view to see if any future movies crop up. Even then it will be minimal maintenance moving forward, since the ones that are likely to crop up aren't too far off in most cases.

Right now, it’s an extremely accurate look up and provides 114 titles for my wife to thumb through when she needs to find a movie more tailored to her liking.

To be honest they’re not completely all chick flicks either. My wife loves LOTR and they came through on the initial scan and because she likes them I left them there too.

[stuckless]

@PIX64 - You cannot preserve custom metadata fields. You can preserve recording metadata, but not custom fields. I'm considering a "lock" mechanism where you can lock certain fields and prevent them from being updated.

@wrems - You could have created a playlist with all the videos for your wife. Then in phoenix vfs, you could use use a playlist source to create the view. Also putting new movies in here queue would be fairly easy, since if you add new movies to her playlist, then they'd automatically show up.

<view name="wr_chick_flicks" label="WR Movies - Chick Flicks">
      <option name="root" value="ChickFlicks"/>
      <description>Display chick flick related movies</description>
      <source name="playlists" />
      <presentation>
            <sort by="title"/>
      </presentation>
</view>

This assumes that you have a playlist called "CheckFlicks"

[wrems]

I considered doing something like that. At the same time, that would have been more maintenance. I'd have to remember every title as I add them whether to add it to the playlist for chick flicks.

It just seemed easier in my mind to let the PQL statement grab more than necessary then strip out the ones I don't want in there to be sure in the future it grabs any Romance, Drama, Musicals etc from my overall library. This way I could let it go for quite some time before eyeballing and extracting the anomalies.

Thanks for the statement! I might be able to use that else where.

[PiX64]

my chick flicks view...tweaked for my needs. thanks wrems for the direction.

<!DOCTYPE vfs SYSTEM "vfs.dtd">
<vfs>
      <views>
            <view name="mr_chick_flicks" label="MR Movies - Chick Flicks">
                  <description>MR Display chick flick related movies</description>
                  <view-source name="sagevideoimportsv7" >
                        <filter 
							by="pql" 
							value="Genre contains 'Romance' or 
									Genre contains 'Musical' or 
									Genre contains 'Music' or 
									Genre contains 'ChickFlicks' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0974661' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0343660' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0356470' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0391304' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0490084' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0490084' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0352248' or
									IMDBID = 'tt1314228' or
									IMDBID = 'tt1325004' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0369436' or
									IMDBID = 'tt1001508' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0250494' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0449059' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0899106' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0899106' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0397535' or
									IMDBID = 'tt1259571' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0481141' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0414387' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0244970' or
									IMDBID = 'tt1027862' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0356680' or
									IMDBID = 'tt1142798' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0489237' or
									IMDBID = 'tt1017451' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0452694' or
									IMDBID = 'tt1099212' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0430770' or
									IMDBID = 'tt1193138' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0473308' or
									IMDBID = 'tt0098635'
									and MediaType = 'Movie' and Rated &lt;&gt; 'G'"
						/>
                  </view-source>
            </view>


            <view name="mr_chick_flicks" label="MR Movies - Chick Flicks">
                 <description>Display chick flick related movies</description>
                  <view-source name="mr_chick_flicks" >
                        <filter by="pql" value=
"
IMDBID = 'tt0298203' or
IMDBID = 'tt0765010' or
IMDBID = 'tt0181875' or
IMDBID = 'tt0116483' or
IMDBID = 'tt0113749' or
IMDBID = 'tt0472198' or
IMDBID = 'tt0425413' or
IMDBID = 'tt1125849' or
IMDBID = 'tt0332452' or
IMDBID = 'tt0396269' or
IMDBID = 'tt0163651'
">
                              <option name="scope" value="exclude"/>
                        </filter>
                  </view-source>				 
                  <presentation>
                        <sort by="title"> </sort>
                  </presentation>
            </view>
      </views>
</vfs>