Badging already recorded movies

Channels iOS Feature Requests
#1

I am SO happy about the badging you just added to show that an item (eg movie) in some "upcoming" list has already been recorded. REALLY nice job, REALLY helpful.

And now, in the grand entitled consumer tradition, I'm going to ask for more!
I'm not sure if this is a client or server-side feature, so apologies if this is the wrong location.

  1. The feature as implemented is still somewhat buggy. Specifically, consider the iPad.
    Suppose I go to the Guide tab and view a list of time-line-based channels. That view, when accessed in various ways (tap on a movie in the timeline, or tap on the channel for a timeline) will show the various movies correctly badged (sorta... we'll get to that).
    BUT click on the little "calendar" icon at the top right of this screen to get the On Later view. This On Later view has various badgings (eg for a new season) but it's somewhat random in whether or not it shows the "already recorded" badge. The Upcoming Movies section shows the badges, but the On Today section does not.

  2. I'm not sure quite how you do the matching of "new movie" with "already recorded movie", but it's imperfect. Especially problematic (though not the only issue) is the case where one channel (Pluto or whatever) is presenting the movie as a "TV movie" whereas another channel presented as a "movie movie". I know this is a difficult problem, especially for movies that have been remade, or the same similar one or two words is repeated for five different movies. But I think there's scope to do a lot better, from a combination of keyword matching AND asking the user. Which gets us to

  3. I'm sure that many users are simple "fire and forget" customers who want something simple. But there are also the obsessive, collecting and curating, customers like myself... For people like me, I'd like to see more power in the system, albeit hidden behind menus so it mostly doesn't bother the simple users.
    So I could imagine a set of badging menu items that include things like

  • "Seen it" (much like the purple triangle badge you already use, but for stuff already deleted, saw in a theater, etc)
  • "Does this movie match that one in your library?" (so basically the case of same name, but the system is unwilling to match them because of date or whatever)
  • "Not interested" (basically a variant of the purple triangle badge, another way of saying "don't care")
  1. Once we have the various views all showing badging correctly, IMHO it would be nice if display orders utilized this, Show the "already seen", "not interested", and "already in library" posters at the very start or very end of each view so they can easily be skipped.

But overall, thanks so much for adding this. The app just keeps getting better :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#2
  1. It's important to realize that On Later shows 3 different things. Airings (actual specific episodes), Movies (duh, movies), and TV Shows (the grouping thing of episodes). On Today, is showing episodes airing later today. If those items are in your library, then yeah, it'll badge it. You may be thinking it should show a badge because the TV Show is in your library. It does not. It WILL do this in the rows that are showing actual shows, like "New Seasons". I hope that clears that up.
  2. When checking guide data items with your library, it can only show items in your library that match the guide items. Guide items from our guide data, will never match recordings you got from another source, like Pluto. This is because they have different unique ids. There's no way to match them. The good news is, we're doing work to get all content in your library to have all of the indexable IDs so that features like this universally work. We just need some time as we do this as it's very tricky.
    3 & 4. Thanks for the feedback.
#3

Hi John,

Thanks. Let me show you what I mean, so you understand.

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So we have the first image above. We see, as expected 13 Hours is badged correctly (and one Indiana Jones movie is badged but not the others in the set...)

OK, good, that's what we want. Now look at On Tonight

IMG_1274.PNG
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First point is that clearly badging is supported for a few situations, in this case a New Season and a movie I've scheduled. Second point is look at the movie Black Sunday in the lowest row of the image. If I look at it in detail (as I have done) it's correctly badged as recorded. But as displayed in the "overview" it is not badged. To me that looks like a bug.
I've no idea what your rules are regarding TV episodes, but that's a lower priority – if I see what looks like an inconsistency there I'll let you know, but this strikes me as a clear Movie inconsistency.

Good luck with the unique IDs! I can see why that's not a trivial issue...
FWIW the cases I'm seeing as not matching right now are not things like a movie I imported into the library from some other recording/media; it's things like a movie on the Pluto Action channel not matching against a movie from a Stirr channel, or whatever. But of course it is the same issue if we have something like Pluto use one set of UUIDs across all their content, and Stirr use a completely unrelated set of such IDs.