Custom hierarchical browsing

[sonichouse]

Was reading http://forums.rokulabs.com/viewtopic.php?t=15735 on the roku forums, and thought this would be a great addition to firefly.

I assume that we could do this when the much awaiting scripting engine arrives 😉

[daflow]

Thanks for bringing this topic here. I’ll repeat the post, so its easier to read this thread.

Please add the possibility to configure custom browsing hierarchies. IMHO this is a killer feature !!

A very good example implementation is the MagicNodes script for MediaMonkey:
see http://www.mediamonkey.com and http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19168

With this script, the user can define custom hierarchies like:

By Year and Genre

This results in a tree representation:

+ By Year and Genre

+ 2002

+ Alternative

+ Hot Hot Heat

+ Make Up The Breakdown

+ The Decemberists

+ The Vines

+ ...

+ Blues

+ ...

+ 2003

+ 2004

+ ...

The above example is the very basic usage scenario. The mentioned script can also address SQL features for advanced use:

Genre (Date added)

This gives a tree by genre with all albums sorted by their addition date to the library, showing the artist, the album name and the album year in parenthesis while omitting the sort key (which would be the number of days since added: e.g. ‘120 days’):

+ Genre (Date added)

+ Alternative

+ Blues

+ Taj Mahal - Dancing the Blues (1993)

+ Alvin Youngblood Heart - Territory (1998)

+ ...

+ Bohemian

+ Classical

+ ...

This is immensely powerful and I’d also be willing to pay for an software upgrade that supports custom hierarchical browsing 😉

I’m very interested in this feature.

For all who’ve never used it: give it a try with MediaMonkey and I bet you’ll love it.

[daflow]

Ron, what do you think?

[grommet]

Late reply, but the UI browsing view/hierarchy on the Roku SoundBridge is fixed. Firefly can’t control it. This is the same for both RSP and DAAP. When you move through the UI, it just sends appropriate query requests to the server.

When Ron implements a UPnP AV server in Firefly eventually, he will be able to have some of this browse “control” via Server Containers…. but you’d be using the slower UPnP AV protocol when that happens. (Roku has a ‘server container’ bypass function, “Browse By Server Containers” — which is the default, if the UPnP AV server doesn’t offer advanced search functionality for the native UI.)

[Author]

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