Smart Playlist Question

I can't get on the Kodi forum since the breech. Hope you don't mind me asking this here.

I wanted to make a playlist to show the best movies for a given decade. Let's use the 30's as an example.

We have 11 playlists.

10 are playlists, one for each year of the decade (1930-1939). Each playlist sorts that single year by rating, returning the top three movies for that year. Works when called directly.

1 playlist is the master that calls all the subroutine playlists to combine the 30 movies into a master list for that decade.

If it worked as I wanted, it would return 30 movies, the top three movies from each year combined into one list. (3x10)

But for some reason the limit of 3 is ignored when you call the subroutine playlists, and they return every movie from their respective year. The limit line in the ten subroutines are completely ignored. Why?

Can you think of a way around this?

PS If I gathered all the movies from the 30s into one list, sorted by rating and took the top 30, it would not have an even distribution (3 per year).

Thanks

Quote from chewitt

I have little experience with playlists, but have you tried the node editor? Nodes are things like "recently added" and are constructed from content in the library using filters. The add-on is in the Kodi repo.

NB: You have PM regarding the Kodi forum account.

Nodes are completely new to me. I'll look into it.

Forgive me, your comment on the Kodi forum is too cryptic for me. Was that an OK?

10,000+ posts. You're awesome Chewitt.

2 questions:

"Manually creating or editing a custom node

So now we understand how the default nodes work, lets have a look at making a custom node. Custom nodes live inside your Userdata folder. To create custom nodes, the first step is to copy the whole of the default node file structure from the default library folder to a new folder called library inside your Userdata folder.

So, in the case of Windows, copy the 'video' and the 'video_flat' folders from C:\Program Files (x86)\Kodi\system\library to %appdata%\Kodi\userdata\library."

1 But where do I find the default node file structure equivalent in LE? ^^^^^^^

2 The icon in question...do I create it? Can the node work without it?

I did not see an example where they used the "order" function. I'd like to see if this much works as expected.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<node order="10" type="filter">
<label>Movies 1930</label>
<content>movies</content>
<match>all</match>
<icon></icon>
<limit>3</limit>
<rule field="year" operator="is"><value>1930</value></rule>
<order direction="descending">rating</order>
</node>

I run the default skin.

When I made my first node with the addon, the contents of the VIDEO menu had been wiped clean in favor of the new node I had created. That scared the crap out of me. I have over 50 playlists that have been honed over the years apparently disappear. They came back when I deleted the new node.

I think I need to see some video of what's going on with this.

Right now, it seems like finding an answer to my original question would be easier to find than to learn all this.

Why do the subroutine-playlists IGNORE their limit settings, when called from a master-playlist? Can someone ask in the Kodi forum for me? I can't post there anymore.