Movies
The Movies screen is a movie browser for your movie collection. Instead of a flat list, it presents your films as rows of posters that you scroll through horizontally, with each row grouped by genre (plus a few special rows). It is designed for a 10‑foot / remote‑control experience but works equally well with a mouse.
The screen is made up of stacked horizontal rows. Each row has a label on the left and a strip of movie posters you can scroll through. The rows are built automatically from the files in your Movies library:
| Row | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Continue Watching | Movies you've started but not finished (see below). Only appears when you have something to resume, and always sits at the top. |
| Recent | The 10 most recently added movies, by file creation date. |
| Genre rows | One row per genre (Action, Comedy, Drama, …), listed alphabetically. A movie appears in every genre it belongs to, so the same film can show up in several rows. Movies with no genre information are grouped under Unknown. |
Each poster is drawn from the movie's artwork. Where no poster can be found, the movie's title is shown as text in the poster's place instead.
A green progress bar is drawn along the bottom of each poster showing how far through the movie you are, based on your saved playback position. The bar only appears once you're past the first minute, so briefly sampled files don't get marked.
A movie appears in the Continue Watching row when all of the following are true:
- it was last watched within the last two weeks, and
- you watched at least the first minute, and
- you watched less than 95% of it (i.e. you didn't effectively finish it).
The row is ordered most‑recently‑watched first, so the film you last stopped appears at the front. The row is rebuilt every time you return to the Movies screen, so a movie you've just been watching surfaces at the top‑left automatically.
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Left / Right | Scroll through the posters in the current row. |
| Up / Down | Move between rows. |
| Enter / OK | Open the selected movie's details screen, where you can play or resume it. |
| Mouse wheel | Scrolls the focused row left/right. |
| Click / double‑click | Select / open a poster. |
| Esc / Back / Home | Leave the Movies screen. |
| Ctrl+S | Clear the saved resume point for the selected movie. This also removes it from Continue Watching and clears its green progress bar. Your place in the list is kept, so it won't jump. |
| q q q (press Q three times) | Force a full metadata / artwork refresh for every movie (see below). |
When you select a movie and choose to resume, playback starts from your saved position.
For each movie the screen tries to find a poster and genre/year information in this order:
- Cached metadata retrieved by NextPVR's metadata lookup (poster, genres, year).
-
Artwork next to the file — a
.jpg/.pngwith the same name as the movie file. -
Artwork in the movie's folder —
folder.jpg,folder.png,poster.jpg,poster.png,cover.jpg, orcover.png.
Display titles are derived from the filename: dots and underscores become spaces and a trailing year (e.g. 2021) is trimmed off, so The.Movie.2021.1080p.mkv is shown as The Movie.
The first time you open the Movies screen in a session, if fewer than half of your movies have cached metadata, a background refresh starts automatically to fill in the missing posters and genres. Progress is shown as a message on screen, and the rows update when it finishes.
You can trigger a full refresh at any time by pressing Q three times in a row. The refresh runs in the background, so you can keep browsing while it works.
The library scans your Movies folder (and all sub‑folders) for these video extensions:
.mkv .mp4 .m4v .avi .mov .wmv .mpg .mpeg .ts .m2ts .vob .iso .divx .flv .webm
The Movies menu item is hidden until you tell NextPVR where your movies live. To enable it:
- Add a Video Library directory and name it exactly
Movies(case‑insensitive), pointing at the folder that holds your movie files. - Restart / re‑open the UI.
Once a Video Library directory named Movies is configured, the Movies item appears in the main menu and the screen scans that folder. If no such directory is configured, the menu item is automatically removed.
Tip: Because genres, posters and years come from metadata, you'll get the best‑looking screen after letting the metadata refresh complete (or running it with q q q).