Possible to change TV Show order?

[illingr]

I have about 30 tv shows on boxee. I'd like to organize them so the shows i watch more frequently are shown first in the tv show list. Is there anyway to do this other than removing all the shows and manually adding them back in the order you like them?

[darcilicious]

Unfortunately, no. However, you could make the most frequently watched shows your "favorites"... versus having all 30 shows in one screen.

[illingr]

Thanks for the reply. I'm actually already viewing them from the favorites screen - because some are online streamed and some are local. Oh well. Thanks for the reply.

[Ronald]

Unfortunately, no. However, you could make the most frequently watched shows your "favorites"... versus having all 30 shows in one screen.

Actually I see one way to do it, though it is a bit extreme, and would demand a full rescan each time he wants to change the order again (though not when just inserting something new).

The method I'm hinting at is simply to use a "tvshow.nfo" file for every TV show, with each such file having a title tagline before the ID tagline, and editing that title so as to include a simple ordinal number. Since Boxee will accept this as a valid title when getting it from an NFO file this way, it will then sort all the shows in the specified numeric order.

Various numbering schemes are possible, but it is best to not fixate on numeric accuracy, but rather settle for string-related functionality.

For example, if you already have the "111: real_showtitle_111" and "112: real_showtitle_112" then inserting something between them with a strictly numeric approach would require renumbering by editing NFO files for all shows from number 112 and up...

But if you just treat them as extensible strings instead, then the obvious way of doing it is to keep all existing titles unchanged, and instead entitle the new show to something like "1115: real_showtitle_1115". And that still leaves room for some more additions to either side without again having to extend the digit count.

This way you can always insert unlimited new shows between existing ones, at cost only of having to use longer number strings, and you never have to renumber or make a full rescan except when you want to change already existing titles and/or ordering (as Boxee will see that as old shows disappearing, which usually requires full rescan).

So for those that can live with having a 'weird number' in front of the real title, this should solve the ordering problem.


But it would of course be even better if the Boxee Team could implement the separate 'sorttitle' tagline discussed a while ago in other posts, so that this kind of ordering could be enforced by user NFOs without affecting the titles displayed in the show lists.

And a further improvement would then be to add a new sort option to both 'Movies' and 'Shows' lists, so that we could choose whether the sorting should be done relative to 'sorttitle' or the normal 'title' displayed in the lists. That would give us the best of both worlds, exchangable by toggling a single option flag...

Edit:
Naturally this method could only work for local files at present, as we have no way to apply user-supplied NFOs to online material.
Perhaps that is yet another future improvement to consider. (I see some possible ways to implement that as well.)

Best regards: Ronald