Sorting in the Windows 8.1 Video App

[Dave-H]

Sorry if this is a known issue, but searching didn't really come up with anything about it.

 

I have the Windows 8.1 video app set to display my video collection, it's all just in a single folder on my archive drive, I've excluded all the Windows user video folders.

I don't have any purchased content.

 

It works fine as far as playing the videos goes, but the display of my videos is not sorted properly.

The first video in the list is in completely the wrong place (the title begins with "t"!) and after that the videos are partly listed in alphabetical order, but then become apparently randomly listed about two thirds of the way through.

 

The option at the top of the screen to sort A-Z or by date added seems to do absolutely nothing.

When I select the other option from the currently selected one, the screen refreshes but then comes back exactly as before!

 

I've tried manually clearing the app's database and starting again, but the files still come back in the same wrong order!

Am I missing something obvious here?

 

Edited January 8, 2015 by Dave-H

[Dave-H]

Anyone?

Please can someone at least confirm whether their video app is doing the same thing or not?

[NoelC]

It's possible most folks here don't use Apps, or just don't use Windows 8.1.

 

I'd try it for you but I personally never run Apps (I can't because I have UAC disabled), even though I'm running Windows 8.1 Media Center Edition.  I organize files via folders on the hard drive and use File Explorer (which still seems to sort things properly) to access them.  I play media on the desktop using the traditional applications such as Media Player.

 

It's admirable that you're trying to embrace Microsoft's newest stuff, but at some point the lack of substance just frustrates a person enough that they walk away from it.  If there were undeniably better things available from the Fischer Price interface, there's be a reason to suffer through the bad parts, but those things never materialized.

 

-Noel

[Dave-H]

Thanks Noel.

All you need to do is to temporarily add your videos folder to your Windows video library if they're not there already, and then when you run the app it should import them.

I'd just be interested to know what order it displays them in, and whether the sort selection option at the top of the page actually does what it says it should!

Cheers, Dave.

[NoelC]

Beyond not being able to run Apps because UAC is off, I find that entirely avoiding the use of Libraries seems to work around most/all problems with File Explorer failing to update the display properly after operations such as delete, copy, or move.  It's possible the troubles with Libraries are at the root of what you're seeing as well.

 

There are a lot of "new" things in Windows that make it not work as well as it ought to.  Avoiding them and sticking to the traditional parts (which are all one really needs in an OS) make it work more predictably.

 

I'm not willing to reconfigure my Win 8.1 main system, but I do have some VMs I can test more freely with...  Libraries are hidden, so I'll have to unhide those.

 

Win 10, with UAC enabled and able to run Apps

 

I unhid Libraries, then copied 4 videos into the Videos "subfolder" of Libraries.  Nothing at all appeared in the Video App.  Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I will not have a Microsoft account, but prefer a local account instead.

 

 

This is one of many reasons I have no interest in Apps.

 

I'm being called away from my desk.  I'll check on Win 8.1 when I get a moment.

 

-Noel

Edited January 12, 2015 by NoelC

[NoelC]

Win 8.1 x64:

 

I changed the EnableLUA registry key to 1, then rebooted.

 

Then I copied the same four video files I showed above to my Videos library folder, which was empty.

 

I started the Xbox Video App and the result was the same as above initially, but then I noticed a [ Personal Videos ] button that was not shown on the Windows 10 App.  Upon pressing it, I saw the four videos I had copied, already in alphabetical order.

 

Clicking the "By date added" link to change it to "By A to Z" changed nothing.  The four of them are still listed in alphabetical order - probably because they were copied in that order.  So I added another one, which appeared at the end.  Since the name is a number, it should have sorted in front of the others when I changed to "By A to Z", but it did not - it stayed at the end.  Closing and reopening the Videos App did not change the result from what you see here - the 25C video was listed in the order shown here no matter what I clicked.

 

 

The failure to sort that you're seeing is hereby confirmed on another system.

 

Someone please remind me again why a Videos App (that doesn't quite work) is needed or has any merit above and beyond the normal Media Player or Media Center applications for Desktop. 

 

Thanks for allowing me to confirm that completely avoiding Metro Apps has been the right choice.

 

-Noel

[Dave-H]

Thanks a lot for doing that Noel.

I wonder why the "Personal Videos" option isn't there in Windows 10, very strange.

Anyway, that seems to confirm that this behaviour is "by design", and it really is rubbish!

I'm just amazed that when I searched for information about this, absolutely nothing came up about it.

Surely others must have noticed that it's not working as it should do!

Another thing I've noticed is that if you remove all the videos from the library, although the app puts up an error message if you try to play them, they are all still displayed on the Personal Videos page, and there seems to be no way of removing them other than by manually deleting the thumbnail files and the app's database folders and starting again.

Really, really rubbish!

[NoelC]

Rubbish - an excellent choice in words to describe this.

 

I'm sure there are people who still wonder why Microsoft has failed to gather interest in Windows 8.  I mean, it's not like the Videos App is brand new, right?  By now, YEARS after the introduction of the brave new Metro world, it ought to be perfect, right?

 

Perhaps Microsoft DID get negative feedback on it, which is why the whole feature is removed from Win 10's Videos App.  Deleting functionality is generally much easier than fixing it.  Given the somewhat undisciplined genre of the universal development environment, I wonder if this says really bad things about the maintainability of Microsoft's OWN Apps.  We can only imagine.

 

Windows 10 is doing nothing I can see to reduce the myopic focus on Metro, which is the most disappointing and depressing thing about it so far.  It's gotten to the point where I just avoid thinking about it.

 

-Noel

[Dave-H]

Well it all seems to be about touch-screen smartphones and tablets now, those of us who obstinately want to carry on using "proper" computers are obviously now just an afterthought.

Launching Windows 8 with no way of sorting the start screen tiles apart from manually dragging them around was a prime example of this madness.

This probably didn't matter to the target audience who just had tiles for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, but for the rest of us who actually really use their computers rather than just play with them, this was an absolute nightmare.

I can't believe that the beta testers didn't tell MS hundreds of times that they shouldn't release Windows 8 like that, but did they listen? No, they knew best, but then had to hastily fix it in Windows 8.1!

 

I use Classic Start menu, which is the only thing that makes Windows 8/8.1 usable as far as I'm concerned, and thank goodness for it.

It's one of those programs that's so good you can't believe that it's actually free!

 

What would it have cost MS to put similar functionality into the OS in the first place?!