Making use of categories
Categories in VDO give each video a high-level content type label. Rather than relying entirely on tags, titles, or descriptions to understand what kind of video something is, a category provides a stable and immediate signal about the nature of the content.
Every video in your library can be assigned to one category. This does not replace other metadata — it works alongside tags, playlists, collections, and descriptions to make your library easier to navigate and search.
Why categories matter
Categories serve three distinct purposes in VDO.
Filtering search results
When searching your library, you can narrow results by category. If you are looking for an educational tutorial or a specific movie, filtering by category immediately removes unrelated content types from the results. This makes search faster and more precise, especially in larger libraries.
Finding related videos
VDO uses categories as one of the signals when computing related videos for any given video. A family recording is more likely to surface other home and family content as related. A documentary is more likely to relate to other documentaries. A surveillance clip stays grouped with other monitoring footage rather than being compared against entertainment content.
This matters because content type alignment is often as relevant as keyword overlap. Two videos can share similar words in their descriptions while being completely different types of content. Categories help prevent that kind of mismatch in recommendations.
Library organisation
At a glance, categories tell you what is in your library without needing to open individual videos. They work well alongside collections and playlists for grouping and browsing content by type rather than just by topic or tag.
Available categories
The following categories are available in VDO. Each video can be assigned to one.
-
Home & Family
Personal, family, and home-life videos.
Birthdays, gatherings, everyday moments, and any video that captures personal or family life. These videos often have strong ties to dates, people, and collections rather than topic-based metadata.
-
Movies
Films and full-length movie content.
Full-length feature films, short films, and cinematic content. VDO treats movies as a distinct content type, keeping them separate from episodic content and other long-form formats.
-
Shows & Series
TV shows, web series, and episodic content.
Episodes from TV shows, web series, limited series, and any content that follows an episodic structure. Assigning this category helps VDO group related episodes and surface them more accurately.
-
Documentaries
Non-fiction documentary films and factual storytelling.
Non-fiction films, investigative journalism pieces, nature documentaries, and factual storytelling. Documentaries often have rich descriptions and benefit from semantic search when AI is enabled.
-
Music Videos
Music performances, official videos, and song-based visuals.
Official music videos, live performances, concert recordings, and any video where the primary focus is a musical piece. Useful for separating music content from other video types in your library.
-
Podcasts
Podcast episodes in video or recorded visual format.
Video recordings of podcast episodes, interview-format content, and long-form discussion-based videos. Categorising these separately helps when browsing or filtering by format.
-
Educational
Tutorials, lectures, explainers, and learning material.
How-to guides, technical tutorials, university lectures, online course recordings, and any content where the primary purpose is teaching or explaining a topic. This category pairs especially well with tags and descriptions for finding related learning material.
-
Shorts
Short-form videos and clips.
Brief clips, highlights, and any short-form video that does not fit into a longer format category. VDO applies slightly different ranking behaviour for shorts because the content is typically concise and metadata can be sparser.
-
Travel & Vlogs
Travel diaries, trip recordings, and destination vlogs.
Travel documentation, destination guides, trip recaps, and personal vlog-style content. These videos often benefit from location-based tags and date grouping alongside the category.
-
Sports & Games
Sports footage, matches, gameplay, and gaming recordings.
Match recordings, sports highlights, gameplay capture, esports footage, and any video centred on a sport or game. Keeping this separate from other categories helps VDO surface relevant content when browsing or filtering.
-
Work
Office, meeting, presentation, and work-related recordings.
Screen recordings, meeting captures, presentation walkthroughs, and professional or workplace-related video content. Useful for keeping work recordings distinct from personal and entertainment content in a shared library.
-
Surveillance
Security camera, monitoring, and surveillance footage.
Security camera feeds, motion-triggered recordings, home monitoring footage, and any video captured by a surveillance system. VDO applies stronger same-category weighting for surveillance content so that security footage stays grouped separately from other video types.
-
Others
Videos that do not fit any other defined category.
A catch-all for videos that do not clearly belong to any defined category. Because this category is intentionally broad, VDO applies softer category-based weighting when computing related videos for content in this group.
Assigning a category
You can assign a category to any video from the video detail view. In future videos can be auto categoriezed with video analysis batch processing when AI is turned on.
As of today VDO does not have any option to create a new category. We will add this feature if there is a demand for it.