I see the posts about random sort orders for movies and music. I see people complaining that there are multiple posts about that. While this one is similar it is NOT that!
My idea is for a simple option to pick a random movie. Not sort movies randomly. The server would simply just pick one at random (non played movie) and play it. The user would not have to do anything other than simply click on a RANDOM PLAY button.
This could be expanded into RANDOM PLAY GENRE where the server would list the genres of movies and so you could pick Western, Horror, etc… But just a random play alone would be a very cool feature.
It’s definitely not exactly what you asked for, but you can achieve something close to it by creating a randomly sorted Smart Collection that’s restricted to one movie.
Playing the collection will result in a random movie being played. The benefit of this method is that you can apply whatever filter you want, like genres, recent play status etc.
Just following up on Otto’s post which was aiming at an alternative approach to get to a random movie
I had setup my own “random” hub to show on the home screen – similar to the one in your example above. However I was shooting for 6 movies (to still get some choice) and tried to consider how much I liked a movie (rating) vs. how long it’s been since I’ve watched it
The button I believe OttoKerner and tom80h are referring to, but not really explaining (and is buried in the support articles if you search “shuffle”), is this one:
You’ll find it on Library screens in the set top players as well (on Roku it’s on the left instead of right on the same screen).
It’s not specifically a “play random movie” but a “play all in this library in random order”.
I go with @tom80H approach myself and created a smart collection to generate a set of random movies and then put that on my Home Screen as a dedicated hub. I like their approach to weed out recently played movies… I’m gonna have to incorporate that one in mine too (maybe not quite to that granularity though).
Yeah, I’ll probably do the smart collection as well. I don’t want anything scrambling my movies. I work very very hard to have them in a particular order. Many hours editing sort order tags and no desire to scramble them.
I simply want a button that will pick a single movie and play it. At random. As I stated before, if it added ‘genres’ to the choice that would be cool but as simple as can be button just to play one non played movie at random would really be cool.
Ahh… I ‘mistakenly, apparently’ took that to mean it would randomize the database order. I didn’t know it was a button that would simply play a random movie. I would venture to guess 99% of people don’t know that.
In all fairness, I have NEVER used a shuffle play button in anything. LOL Seriously, never have. Honestly, I took it to be a Shuffle button. Not Shuffle Play button. Since when you hover over it it says Shuffle. Of course, now that you all say this…I feel like a fool. LOL!!!
I can write software and code with the best of them… have 4 college degrees including one in Aeronautical Engineering…and I didn’t know it was shuffle play. LOL!!! Good thing I can laugh at myself.
To beat the dead horse: It’s more than one button press, but simply sorting your library to the type of film you want to see first before hitting shuffle works for me. This example is “Unwatched”
