Video management

[vaatimidona]

Hello everyone, hello Steven.

First, I’d like to thank you for this great software. I’ve been managing my whole music library on iTunes for years, and then I learnt about Musicbee a few years ago. I even asked some wishes on this forum back then, but wasn’t completely ready or didn’t have the time I needed to migrate.

But then, some weeks ago, I finally downloaded the last version, put all my songs on it, organized and managed them, explored all the settings and possibilities of customization for two or three weeks, and definitively abandoned iTunes and welcomed Musicbee.
I must say I am really impressed by all the improvements this software got since last time I tested it. Each time I wonder if there’s a way to do this or that thing, there indeed is. You thought of so many details that make it great.

The new design is just perfect, but it’s not all. The playing bar that takes the colour of the album playing, the action of a double-click on a song that can be personalized, all the possibilities to let it manage our files and folders, the ability to put the month and not just the year on an album’s date (finally my Beatles albums that were released on the same year are in the right order !), the volume equalizer, the auto-DJ, all of these are just amazing details that make your work better than any music manager I’ve tried, and so pleasant to use.

Video management

So, after organizing my music library, I thought “why not trying to do the same with my movies and series collection?”. For a long time, I’ve wanted to organize my video files in a nice display, sorted by episodes and seasons, with posters of the movies, and that could launch the files with my default player … and then I thought “this is the best software I could do this with!”.

So, I tried doing it with the “video mode” of Musicbee, put a few video files and started to organize them, put artworks, names, episodes numbers, and modified some settings to get where I wanted to, but this is where I found one or two little problems, and where I would like to present you some small improvements that I think would be nice.

This is what my desired organization would be like :
- Left panel : artists grouped by genre
        - genre being Movies, Cartoons, Anime, Series, etc.
        - artists being names of series and movies like Star Wars, Adventure Time, etc.
- Central panel : videos sorted with this kind of hierarchy :
        -Name of the artist
               - Number and name of the season (if there are seasons)
               - Artwork of the episode / movie
               - Number of the episode – name of the episode (with sorting by number of the episode)

This screenshot is what it currently looks like, with the central panel showing by “video” and the left one sorting by “artist” and grouping by “genre” :


And this montage is what I wish :


So basically, I am not asking for this exact display (because everyone certainly has its own display he would like to see, a bit different from this one), but for the possibility to personalize it. What I described in the left panel is currently possible (as you can see in the screenshot). Yet, there are two improvements that I would love to see in the central panel:

- When you show by “video”, it displays all your video files, whether you select “all the artists” or one artist in particular in the left panel.
- Being able to change what information is displayed, hierarchy, and sorting settings in the central panel.

I am sorry for the long explanation, and for my bad english, anyway, whether you find these propositions interesting or not to develop, you already have my eternal gratitude for what you have already done.

Thank you for reading

[Bifidusse]

Thank you vaatimidona, you wrote the post I wanted to write today  


I feel the same : MusicBee is so great I'd like to manage my movies & TV shows the same way.


There was a plugin some years ago, but I think it was discontinued.

I don't know what kind of a challenge it is (to support video files). At least MB should be able to read NFO's, I guess.