Sort films by release date?

WD Legacy Products WD TV Media Player
1

The library offers to display films a couple of different ways. “Alphabetically” is exactly that, though “By Date” appears only to be by date-added not by the Film-date which you would expect it to be.

Adding some found 50s and 60s and 70s films as a bunch today for example produces all the sort/display-logic of a handful of confetti!

Sorting by date-added is only beneficial short-term, and even then only if you are planning to watch promptly all the films you just added and it is handy to have them bunched together at the front of the library display.

Otherwise however, they quickly get shunted down the list anyway and might as well be just entirely random before long as you now need to do a search every ■■■■ time because it’s not alphabetical and not in film date order just date-added order which is less than useless when you downloaded a film five years ago, or was it six, or maybe four???!!

I’m not talking about finding them, there’s a perfectly good search function for that (although you still have to know the name very precisely, which sometimes fools with a play on words or some weird spelling or simply something mis-remembered, and then it is all-or-nothing … if you get it right then fine, if you unknowingly call/spell it something slightly different even the search won’t save you other than by plodding through remembered/key words etc.)

I have a large collection and would simply like to have the library sorted in Film-date order, which of course is right there in the .xml anyway so readily available.

It is more than a nuisance when a 1930’s movie for example ends up appearing at the front of the library list among current-day films just because that is when it was added, and can’t simply be automatically reordered with its contemporaries.

I genuinely can’t understand why this isn’t offered, particularly when you can group by genre from precisely the same xml info source. Wouldn’t most people want that as an option so that their library presents naturally by proper sequence going back through the years?Surely it would be/is a glaring omission not to have this?!

Unless of course you can, and somehow I have simply missed how that is achieved?

So if someone more expert/knowledgeable than I can correct me please do … can we have our films displayed in the library in release date order whether from existing xml content or otherwise?

Thanks if you can help!

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Put them in separate folders by whatever subject makes sense to you. I have 10K films etc. set up like that. I view by folders all the time.

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You really do not understand how sorting works. Date of film, is in the metadata, and the date added is a computer sort function, but it does not look in metadata. Get over it.

1 Like
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Thank you Professor for your helpful reply.

I use folder-view often, but frequently find library-view useful and would find it even more-so if it had a release-date sort option too for the convenience of friends and guests wishing to browse a date-ordered collection that is presented with covers, info sheets etc …

I had already gathered that unfortunately this is not an option however, though felt it worth checking now in case it was achievable via a mod or recode before I move away from the otherwise-excellent WDTV which I have used for many years and am more than familiar with tinkering with under the hood to make improvements.

That one however seems still not to be doable, unless someone of a kind and courteous nature knows differently.

Thanks all the same!

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Mr Charm:

Indeed, I do not know everything about everything as you so clearly do.

That, however, is why forums exist and enable those looking for guidance or information to connect with knowledgeable others so that they might help via their greater expertise.

I will try not to trouble you again, and if I appear to be doing so feel free to simply skip to the next dunce and leave me to ask my very silly little questions and wait for someone else to help me to keep learning: I’m sure that in contrast you are in the enviable position of there simply being nothing left that you could possibly need to learn.

Oh, wait …

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OK, whatever. So was there any helpful info in the Anker instructions?