Vista & Categories

[impact]

I know its been mentioned before about how all the categories are currently under General - and how under MCE2005 this was not as useful... it still worked.

Well under Vista - the categories play a more important part to the UI - in the guide there is now a more pronounced categories button / tab that is always visible on the far left. Selecting that brings up the listing of available categories - it appears Vista only allows one level - and it shows General - selecting that does not allow the categories below that to be displayed - so we have some useless functionality now.

Any chance of investigating the promotion of all categories up one level - so that it can be made more useful to us all....

[nac6]

YES PLEASE, ICE look into changing this.

I hate that General cat.

[Russell at IceTV]

Yep, we'll look into it.  The categories in MCE have always been a pain to deal with, but maybe we can find a better solution in Vista.

Russell

[mattg]

How is this progressing, I would be really nice to see this happening in Vista

[Russell at IceTV]

Hi guys,

I'm happy to report that we've improved the category system in MCE!  Please see this post in the Announcement forum for details:

"MCE categories improved"
http://www.icetv.com.au/iceforum/index.php?topic=560

Technical details for the fellow geek-minded:

Categories have always been a problem for us in MCE because of the two-level system they use.  Our database (like most PVRs other than MCE) uses a one-level system for categories, so a program can be marked as being in the categories "Movie", "Children", and "Animated".  The trick is getting those one-level categories converted into the two-level categories that MCE uses, such as "Movie/Children", "Movie/Animated", and "Children/Animated".  This new system we're releasing seems to work pretty well at figuring out how to make the conversions for the MCE guide, but I'll be honest and say it's not entirely perfect.  One problem is with programs marked with a single category.  While we can convert the single category "News" to MCE's top-level "News" category, other single categories such as "Drama" and "Action" only appear under other top-level categories such as "Movie/Drama" or "Children/Action".  They don't appear as a top-level category of their own.  To deal with this problem, we've created a new top-level category called "Other", that contains all other categories below it ("Other/Action", "Other/Adventure", "Other/Drama", etc.).  So if you're doing a search by category, start with the appropriate top-level category such as "Movie", "Children", etc.  If you don't find what you're looking for, you might try the "Other" category as well.  As I said, not perfect, but hopefully it's a step in the right direction and the new system will help you find what you're looking for.

Thanks!
Russell

[impact]

Congrats !