Feature Request: Fine tune the purpose of non movie or tv show content
I assume the purpose of the videos category is for personal home videos?
If so, perhaps adding photos into the mix would be useful as well as auto grabbing stillshots from videos. "Synology Photos" does a wonderful job merging these two mediums into a easy to navigate group. As does android and ios built in gallery apps.
Example of Synologys UI/UX on tvs.
https://www.instagram.com/p/ClrtjpJBXNM/
Lots of other purposes too though:
Music videos
Concert videos
YouTube downloads and the like
Video podcasts
Ambient / background video
Assorted video clips
Etc.
Basically any video you may want to incorporate into CDVR that is not a “TV show” or “movie.”
I agree with this. I have TON's of old video's in my library across several drives, accumulated over 15 years that I would like to view in Channels. Oh, I CAN pull them in ok, but they are in alphabetical order. Channels appears to be looking for a folder structure for video's, that doesn't exist, and I'll never have the time in my remaining lifetime to sort them into folders.
My current solution is to keep using Emby, JUST for this purpose. It pulls them in, sorts them by date and keeps them updated when more are added. But it's the ONLY product I can find that does this. No one else, including VLC supports sort by date so it must be a programming challenge.
I've been through Plex, Emby and others and Channels has clearly emerged as my preferred system because it has an outstanding UI and it's just a trouble free system that works totally reliably with no headaches. It's been running for months with no maintenance. Absolutely love it!
So my goal is to eliminate Emby and just have Channels running on my NAS. There's SO much I love about Channels, vs. the others, so this sort feature is just a wish.
haha, well thanks for that confirmation.
i had the same desire with channels being one stop shop. but i guess im going to try out the synology app. looks promising for what your looking for if you have one of their NAS devices.
Video Groups’ videos can be sorted in many ways. The sorting for the videos in the groups is managed in the Edit Metadata modal on the web admin.
Where in the web admin is this? I've been looking around and can't find it.
Find your video group in the web admin. Click Edit Metadata.
I think you're talking about DVR > Manage > Videos, right? Mine are just in a long list there, and I don't see groups. I presume by your answer there's a better way to organize them? It's not apparent to me. Thanks.
No, Library > Videos.
It's a per Video Group option.
You can individually choose a sort name for each one of your Video Groups
You can choose how to sort recordings within that Video Group
(Think of Video Groups as TV Shows and Video Group recordings as episodes)
Ah, thank you. I think what was throwing me off was I was following the "Plex convention" of having a video be in its own folder, which Pex recommends, among other reasons I guess, so you can also add the subtitle file and poster art to the folder along with the video. So my video page looked like somebody puked folders all over it, with each video having a folder. I'm trying to move away from Plex, so I've got a job ahead of me to pull all the various videos out of subfolders and, for example, put all concert videos into a "Concert videos" folder, instead of each one into its own subfolder under "Convert Videos", such as "Videos>Concert Videos>The Connells Atlanta 2021>file here" (which is how it is now).
That had to be a LOT of work to get it that way!
The docs for Local Content are pretty clear on how to set up your folder structure, including for videos:
Yea, you could say that. 
My wife is a figure skater, and one way I'm going to get her hooked on using Channels is with a virtual skating channel, filled with a ton of skating videos I found online. I put each one in its own folder. 
I found one drawback to this method, or perhaps something I'm overlooking. Previously, with each skating video in its own folder (with the folder matching the title of the file), my virtual channel would display the folder name in the guide, so it might say "2020 U.S. Championships." Now, with them all in folder called "Figure skating," every single guide entry just says "Figure skating." I haven't seen a way to enter individual videos that aren't movies or shows to a virtual channel, but maybe I'm missing it. It's coming back to me that in addition to Plex, that was why I went through and put each video into its own folder (which I just deleted, of course).
EDIT: Thinking out loud, would there be any drawback to moving the skating videos under my "Shows" folder, to try to get individual file names to show up?
When videos are imported, they adopt the title of the video group. Their recording title uses the file name.
So /Figure Skating/2013 National Championships.mp4
Would be titled in Channels:
Figure Skating
2013 National Championships
Here’s a pro tip. Channels flips these for Sport events. This way the title is showing the more descriptive title, like the teams playing, vs the league.
Washington Nationals vs Atlanta Braves
MLB
Set your videos’ genre to Sports event, and it will do the same for your videos.
Thanks! I think maybe it is an issue with truncating things depending on the client?
In the web admin, I get this nice title in the guide for my virtual channel:
In the iOS app, it shows up like this:
I haven't tried it on the Apple TV yet.
The guide only shows the title of shows, not their episode titles.
In the same vein, it only shows the title of the video group, not the video title.
If you employ the trick I mentioned, you’ll get what you want.
