[WarpLover]

I thought I'd try something clever with playlists, but I get a result I cannot explain.
The idea is to execute a playlist to see the best 30 movies for a given decade, three movies from each year (10x3, 30 movies).
Lets use the 1980's as an example.
I have 11 playlists. One I call the master playlist, and 10 that I call the subroutine playlists.

The group of ten playlists are a playlist for each year of the decade. (1980, 1981, 1982...)
These playlists are built the same: find all movies for 198x, sort by rating, and return the top three matches.
When you execute these playlists individually, they work as expected.

Now I make a master playlist that calls all 10 subroutine playlists expecting 30 movies, but it returns every movie for the 80's, completely ignoring the limit=3 in each of subroutine playlists.
What is going on? Can whatever it is be overcome?
Thanks

[PatK]

Should be able to do this. Here I combine a Few Best of Lists, familiar?
 

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<smartplaylist type="movies">
    <name>Combined List</name>
    <match>one</match>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>Best of the 1940&apos;s</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>Best of the 1950&apos;s</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>Best of the 1960&apos;s</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>Best of the 1970&apos;s</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>Best of the 1980&apos;s</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>Best of the 1990&apos;s</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>Best of the 2000&apos;s</value>
    </rule>
    <order direction="ascending">rating</order>
</smartplaylist>

Called up via node listing, all the years are rating limited to 100 and combined is limited in Nodes.

[WarpLover]

Someone at LE suggested I try the node editor, but I did not like how it wiped a lot of stuff in favor of an experiment I tried. I'll stick with playlists. They don't harm anything.

Let's look at my master playlist. You can see how it calls other playlists.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<smartplaylist type="movies">
    <name>The Best of the 30&apos;s</name>
    <match>one</match>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>1930</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>1931</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>1932</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>1933</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>1934</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>1935</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>1936</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>1937</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>1938</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="playlist" operator="is">
        <value>1939</value>
    </rule>
    <group>none</group>
    <limit></limit>
    <order direction="descending">rating</order>
</smartplaylist>
 

A sample subroutine playlist:

1935.xsp

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<smartplaylist type="movies">
    <name>1935</name>
    <match>all</match>
    <rule field="year" operator="is">
        <value>1935</value>
    </rule>
    <group>none</group>
    <limit>3</limit>
    <order direction="descending">rating</order>
</smartplaylist>

It works, except they all return more than the subroutine limit. The question is why the subroutine limit is ignored?

[DarrenHill]

Thread moved to OS independent support, as discussions is not for support requests.

[PatK]

So you are manually creating the smart playlist with an editor or are you using the Kodi internal editor? I note in your 3rd post <limit></limit>, might want to put a limit in. Nodes offer the ability to set limits, use smart playlists; you might want to check out the node editor. My suggestion is to try to link 2 or your playlists with a third, if successful try more until failure.

[WarpLover]

I use a text editor most of the time. I only use the built in editor when I can't remember what keywords are available.
My examples above may be stale. I recently wiped both of my sbc's to install fresh, and did not copy over the newest playlist changes to a safe place.
I will revisit and add one subroutine playlist at a time as you suggest.