Well I went out and bought an SMP a few days ago and thought I’d post some more detailed answers to my own questions for anyone else who might be interested. Thanks again to Tony for his initial input.
- It’s not the best implementation but like Tony says you can get the desired result by using the Queue. My process is as follows:
- I browse my audio by folders and enter the folder of the album I want to add to the “now playing” queue.
- Choosing the options menu I can “select many” and choose all files on the current page.
- If required, I move to the next page and bulk select the rest of the files as well (it’s still in “select many” mode).
- I then choose “add to queue” from the options menu and both selected pages will be added.
- I then go back a few times and browse to the next album folder I want to enqueue and perform the above steps again.
- Once my selections are made, I go to the Dashboard → Queue → Audio and press “Play” once I select the first item.
- I then go “Home” and choose the “Now Playing” item from the main tile selections.
- If I want to shuffle the list, I then change the playback mode to “Shuffle”.
- My selected albums are now going to play in a jukebox mode.
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Follow the same steps as in 1) above except for videos. You can’t make a single queue out of a mix of audio and video - they’re kept separate.
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I haven’t found a good way to filter out recently watched items yet, but with the Content Info for TV shows being available I find this requirement a lot less important since you can check the synopsis of recent episodes and determine which one you’re up to yourself without having to start viewing each video like I had to on the old box.
EDIT: It does track which videos have been viewed after all! When viewing the Content Info for a video file, there’s a “circle” icon next to the favourite icon that changes once viewed. I’ve only had it fill with a half-circle even though I’ve watched it from start to end, but presumably it should totally fill if it’s fully watched. Either way, it is tracking when a video file has been watched.
- This works well on my configuration but admittedly I haven’t watched a lot of content yet since I’ve only had the device for a few days now. But I have tried a variety of file formats (MKV, BR ISO, AVI, M2TS) and they have worked fine.
That’s about it.
