File stacking

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XBMC's file stacking feature handles your multi-part files in a clean, intuitive manner. File stacking combines your multi-part files into a single item in the file list or library. Playback of stacks is completely transparent to you as the user, all parts are automatically queued for playback in order. Stacking is a view option available in videos file mode window. It is always applied when scanning movies into the library.

1 How does file stacking work?

The stacking function is presented with a list of file items from a directory listing.

1. Sort the file list alphabetically.
2. CD1, CD2, ..., CD9 directories are collapsed if they contain only one video file.
3. Each filename is tokenized into Title, Volume, Ignore and Extension parts.
4. For each consecutive filename where all tokens except Volume match, the file's index in the file list is stored in a vector.
5. Once the above condition fails...
   1. The stack path is generated (eg. "stack://movie-cd1-xvid.avi , movie-cd2-xvid.avi")
   2. The stack name is created from the Title Ignore and Extension tokens (eg. movie-xvid.avi)
   3. The path and label of the first file item are replaced by the stack path and stack name, respectively.
   4. The remaining file items in the stack are removed from the file list.
6. This continues until the file list is exhausted.

2 Tuning

File stacking can be tuned by the user to match obscure cases using the moviestacking advanced setting.

3 Deficiencies

• Stacking is currently only applied to movies.
• Stacking is currently only applied to filenames, not the full path.
• The default expressions will NOT stack files which use only a number as the volume token (eg movie1.avi, movie2.avi). This is intentional due to false positives which can occur with sequels in a flat directory layout. Some solutions to this problem (in order of best to worst) follow...

1. Use a dir-per-movie directory layout, see the append example of the moviestacking advanced setting.
2. Rename offending files to match one of the more specific volume tokens (ie. cd1, part1, etc).
3. Create special-case regular expressions for those files that fail to stack (see tuning).