Shuffle really large playlists

[jingai]

This is more of a Kodi limitation, but documenting it here for possible future fix/workaround.

Kodi's JSON interface doesn't pay attention to the "shuffled" option when opening playlists. So, in the skill, we use the Files.GetDirectory method to retrieve every item from a playlist, shuffle it, and then add it to the appropriate transient playlist (id 0 or 1).

However, it seems Kodi has a limit to the number of items it can receive in a single Playlist.Add call. This means that shuffling really large playlists will just outright fail.

In practice, this isn't a massive problem because for most really large playlists users are going to want to shuffle them by default, which you can do in the playlist settings in Kodi. But, if the user tells Alexa to "shuffle" the playlist instead of "play/listen to/watch," it will fail even if the playlist is auto-randomized by Kodi.

One solution I can think of is to break up the array into chunks that won't cause Kodi to fail on the request; i.e., make multiple Playlist.Add calls.

Ultimately though, with the large playlists I'm referring to, the whole operation takes ages to complete anyway. It'd be best if Kodi would simply allow us to say "shuffle playlist X," but it doesn't currently and it's been years that it's been asked for.

I'm mostly looking for some discussion around the issue here to see what we might be able to do about this in the skill. Even if we can't do anything, I think having this Issue open will at least serve as a reference point when we get complaints about the behavior.

[m0ngr31]

Breaking them into arrays and sending each isn't a huge deal if we want to go that route.

[jingai]

Observed by Kodi forum user ConstantSphere as well here. Just noting for context.

[jingai]

Splitting up the array works, but it's really slow sending this many items from Amazon to Kodi. There's no other way to do it atm though since Kodi doesn't support shuffling a playlist via JSON-RPC, so just going to push forward with this for now.

[jingai]

This issue is technically addressed, but I'm leaving it open in the event that the Kodi devs add a way to shuffle playlists without manually adding every item to the queue.

For clarity, I know there's an option in the request to shuffle, but for some reason it doesn't work right for me. I have no idea why.

[jingai]

Playlist handling via JSON-RPC is apparently even worse in Kodi 18, so I'm not really holding out much hope that this can be addressed properly any time soon.