Video navigation

The library organizes your videos into three basic categories, Movies, TV Shows and Music Videos. Further these categories are divided into sub-categories, allowing you to find a specific video through criteria like genre, actors, directors, year, or even custom video nodes. Navigating the video library deals greatly with various views, the sidebar menu, and context menu.

Sidebar menu
The sidebar on any given screen, be it in Library view or File view, changes the view types and filters. In most skins you can access the side bar by navigating left till the sidebar opens up, or in some cases you must navigate up or down to bring up those view options.
 * View:
 * You can the toggle between the different display options, amongst others; List, Thumbnails, Fanart and Cover Flow.
 * View of the different layout offered by Confluence Skin


 * Sort By:
 * You can choose what criteria to sort your Videos by. Note the arrow to the right which controls whether the items are sorted in ascending or descending order.


 * Filter
 * Allows you to filter the media files to only show videos that include the specified string in the name. See also Advanced library filtering.


 * Misc Options
 * Hide Watched
 * Toggles between All Videos and Unwatched. XBMC will show either all videos or only unwatched media.


 * Search
 * You can search for a string anywhere in the XBMC video database. See Searching your library for more information.


 * Stack
 * Enables direct playback of videos that are in folders, without having to open those folders first, as well as displaying multi-part video files as single items in non-library views.


 * Flatten
 * Removes the title, genre etc nodes from the library view. Selecting a category takes you straight to the title view.

Contextual menu
In library view, selecting a movie that has been designated as a movie folder, the following options are available:


 * Queue Item
 * Adds the item to the Now Playing playlist.


 * Resume from (time) e.g. 00:02:21
 * If you previously started watching a file (after a preset time elapsed) and stopped, you can resume viewing from the moment you stopped. see also: Advanced settings override


 * Play from here
 * This will start playback from this file onwards (not including the file highlighted)


 * Add to Favourites
 * Adds the item to your Favourites menu.


 * Movie / TV Show Information
 * Shows the relevant information, gathered through scrapers, such as the movie or TV show info of the selected file.


 * Mark as Watched
 * Changes the video status to watched, can also set unwatched, see above.


 * Edit Title
 * Changes the name of the item within the Library.


 * Link to TV show
 * If a particular Movie has a TV series, you can link to said TV Series.


 * Remove From Library
 * Removes the selected item from the video database.


 * Update Library
 * Checks if files in the Library have been added and modifies the database accordingly. Adds missing media to the database.


 * Other possible menu items
 * Play
 * Plays the selected file, resumes a video from the last stopped position.


 * Play using
 * Allows you to select which player to use for video playback, depending on platform available players.

Searching the library
The search button is available to help you search the video database. Select it to begin your search. A keyboard will pop-up where you may enter search terms (SMS style with the remote, or just using the virtual keyboard). Note that search results will appear in the following order (where matches are found) Genres, Actors (Artists), Directors, By Name, and By Plot. Within each grouping movies will always be first, followed by TV shows and then music videos.

Media information screen
In addition to various display layouts, a media information screen can be shown from contextual menu ( on keyboard) or by pressing info on the remote ( on keyboard).

From here you can refresh the information on your media, i.e. in the case of a wrong match during scanning. Here you can also change fanart and media thumbs, where the number of images being offered may depend on your scraper settings.

Linking movies to TV shows
 When you are in the Movies section of XBMC you can select a movie and bring up the contextual menu ( on a keyboard) and select "Link to TV show". This will bring up a list of TV shows that are currently in your library. When you link a movie to a TV show it will make that movie show up in the TV show's library view. Multiple movies can be linked to a TV show, but a movie can only be linked to one show at a time.

Party Mode
The Party Mode option allows you to randomly play Music Videos from your entire music videos collection based on criteria specified in partymode-video.xsp. Simply build a Smart Playlist and save it as partymode-video.xsp in the userdata folder.

Selecting 'Party Mode' from the sidebar will play ALL valid media scanned into your libraries in a random order that meet the conditions specified in the Smart Playlist.