Changes in UI for on-disk or network share provided movie files

Moving this from the general “what’s new” thread so we can focus on this one issue.

Does the new Media Player address any of these issues that marred the SMP experience (in my opinion)?

  • When you put movie sets in folders (e.g. Alien Anthology, Batman, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, etc.), the folders sort together at the beginning and THEN the individual movies sort separately.  They should be sorted as one big group.

  • No way to have a separate Display name from a Sort Name - movies that are in a series, but don’t have easy to sort names (e.g, Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman and Robin, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises) show up alphabetically instead of in the correct order.  There needs to be a Sort Name (Batman 1, Batman 2, Batman 3, …) that is separate from the Display Name.  Display name is used if Sort Name is not filled in.

  • Proper sorting for US English - for example, don’t include leading articles such as “The”, “A”, “An”, etc. when determining sort order (can be addressed by previous bullet).

Any improvements with these items?  I might consider upgrading to this device if those issues were solved.  I don’t care so much about Netflix or any of the online services, as this is the media player on my boat and I usually don’t have good (if any) Internet.

I DEFINITELY agree with the first two points. I HATE how the folders show up before the individual movie files in a given directory, and it’s kind of a pain to have to manually edit the XML files to get them to appear in the right order. I could live with the third point though, as it doesn’t bother me as much as the first two on my SMPs. I have two SMPs in my household, and would DEFINITELY buy two of these units if they correct these issues. Automatic buy if they can also choose to either pass through the core DTS audio, or the DTS-HD audio since my receiver currently doesn’t support DTS-HD, but does support standard DTS output.