Genres

How to use the genres.xml file

The genres.xml is for consolidating multiple genres into groups of master genres.

The main reasons for doing this are to combine lots of similar genres into a single high level, master genre to reduce the amount of on screen genres and also to customise your genre names to your particular set-up.

The format of the file should be

<genres>
    <genre name="Master Genre Name">
      <subgenre>Genre One</subgenre>
      <subgenre>Genre Two</subgenre>
    </genre>
    <genre name="Another Master Genre">
      <subgenre>Genre Three</subgenre>
      <subgenre>Genre Four</subgenre>
    </genre>
</genres>

The <genre name="Master Genre Name"> line defines the name that you want all the subgenre entries to be combined into. This is the genre that will appear on the categories page.

The <subgenre> is the original genre as assigned by IMDB (or other plugin). You can create as many <subgenre> lines as you like and each will be combined into the <genre> entry.

So this can really be used for a couple different purposes... To rename a genre. You'd have just one subgenre that you want to rename to the genre that it is under.

For example, to rename Comedy & Humour to Funnies:

<genres>
    <genre name="Funnies">
        <subgenre>Comedy</subgenre>
        <subgenre>Humour</subgenre>
    </genre>
</genres>

To consolidate genres, for example to combine Thriller, Horror, and Mystery into just Thriller:

<genres>
    <genre name="Thriller">
        <subgenre>Horror</subgenre>
        <subgenre>Mystery</subgenre>
    </genre>
</genres>

Note: You don't need to add "Thriller" to the subgenres because it's already there. If you were to rename the genre to something else, you would need to add it in.

Once you have this xml file configured how you want, you do have to enable its usage by ensuring that the mjb.filter.genres is set to true in the skin.properties file.

Note: You must save this file in UTF-8 format or you may encounter errors.