Video nodes

Template:XBMC wiki toc Nodes are defined views that are used to organize your media from the videos menu. In the past XBMC has had a number of standard nodes such as Title, Director, Year, Studios, Countries, Genres that were hard coded.

(The standard XBMC video nodes)

As of the latest Nightly builds XBMC has introduced the ability to customize these nodes using an XML file. Using XML files really gives great flexibility on how your media is displayed. Don't want your screaming kids stuff in your main movie node... exclude it. Want documentaries in a separate node, create it. Don't like how recently added is presented, change it.

The default Nodes

To understand this a little better, lets take a look at one of the default nodes. You can find these in:

/userdata/Database/video/movies/

And as an example lets take a quick look at the year node in its simplest form:

<node order="3" type="folder">
 <label>562</label>
 <path>videodb://1/3</path>
 <icon>DefaultYear.png</icon>
</node>

As you can see we are using standard xml format here so nothing too complicated.

XML Node components

Order = This is the order that you want to show the nodes. Starts at 1 for the top and goes sequentially so 2 will be the next node down.

Label = This is the text that will show for the node. In this case it is pointing to an ID in the strings.xml file (for transltion purposes) It can also just be any String you want, just type some text instead of the id number.

Path = This can be any valid XBMC path

Icon = Pretty self explanatory really, this is the icon that will show when the node is navigated over