Serviio

Metadata sources should be chosen per directory tree.

Metadata should be overridable by manually provided local data.

It should be possible to design one's own menu levels and labels.

There should be a mechanism for plugins to generate a menu structure from whatever data and metadata is available.

The reasons a twofold;

Movies; If you have 1000 movies online in your server, a single flat Movies menu entry is cumbersome; One wants the ability to sort the movies into contents related groups, in a menu structure.
Don's say "Directors" or "Artists" or "Genre"; those metadata fields are invariably misused by providers.

Large program archives; The Open Archive of the Swedish State Television is a good example; currently menues grow to unbelievable lengths.

I agree about having the option to use local metadata files for select videos.

I understand about the lengthiness of the Movies folder, as I have over 500 titles myself, and over 1000 TV episodes. I solve the issue in two ways. First, I enable the Titles presentation. This provides alphabetical subfolders, which makes it far easier to browse for a title. Second, I use playlists, which Serviio handles wonderfully. This way I can have my most watched videos in a reasonably short and easily browsable list. Also, with my Sony boxes they play one after another, so it isn't necessary to find another movie (or episode) to watch when one ends.

Playlists can be as short or as long as you like. You can group them by genre, actor, or any other method you desire. Yes, it's not as simple as using the metadata tags (which as you point out aren't always on target), but I end up with exactly what I want, and it really doesn't take that much work. I use Playlist Creator (version 3.6.2 is current), but this is a Windows program. If you need one for another OS, someone else will need to chime in here.

Alright, so playlists maybe the way to go. Can you explain a bit more about what a playlist does for serviio and what serviio can do with playlists?

Do I need some plugin or is it native to serviio?

Playlist support is native to Serviio, so no plug-in. Just go into the presentation panel and enable playlists (not at home right now, so I can't look at the screen to tell exactly what the setting is). I believe the option I use is to just display content.

The playlist is named with the playlist file name. For example, I have playlists for 007 (Actually I put all my Sean Connery movies in here), John Wayne, epics, etc. Then use you Playlist Creator to include the video files you want in the list. You can drag and drop files into the list, or use the browse function. Playlist Creator allows you to select a single file, multiple files, or a complete folder. You can change the order of the files listed using arrows on the right. Save the file and Serviio will find the playlist file on its next refresh (make sure you save the playlist file in a folder that Serviio scans).

Now when you go to your player and you select your Serviio server, there will be a Playlists entry. When you select that, your playlists will be listed. Select a playlist and there's the videos you included. It's all really easier and faster to use than it took me to type all of this

That does do quite a bit to solve my problem. Thank You!

This allows me to create one new menu level, right??

Is there any way to use this to do multilevel menues, i e a playlist of playlist names??

I don't think so, but I'll defer to Zip or one of the other long time users for that answer.

No

Commendably concise, but... It would be nice if one could do playlists of playlists as multilevel menues.

Playlists are primarily used to play a sequence of files, so making them hierarchical would be kind of against that. AFAIK there is no standard format that enables that anyway.

Why would "sequential" and "hierarchical" go against each other??? That's no less sequential than just collapsing a range in a list...

There is no real standard for most playlist formats!

m3u playlists commonly allow playlist file names as entries, and at least one app on my android will present such an included playlist as a "catalog" and defer on selection.