BETA: Craft your own experience with Personal Sections on tvOS and iOS

I love this idea!

I do too :heart_eyes:

I think Sort order has an issue on the Admin UI.

I have a Section, Content Type - Video Group.

Sort - Alphabetically. Sort Order - Forward.

When set to Forward, the Admin UI show the video groups in Reverse order (Z to A).
On the client, it is correct in Forward (A to Z).

When i set it to Reverse in Admin Ui, it shows as Forward in Admin UI, But correctly in client as in Reverse.

EDIT. Never mind. Seems you need to have the "Sort Title" filled in in your Video Group, else it messed up how the Personal sections sort it. I had 2 of my 5 Groups have a Sort Title, and the other 3 did not. Once i added that, sort works fine.

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Hmm, that's still a bug. I'll check it out. When sorting, it should fall back to the Title if the Sort Title is blank. Thanks.

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While we are dreaming about features, how about a sidebar with expanding menu options? As you scroll down and highlight an entry, some entries will auto expand to reveal multiple sub-items. Or maybe instead of auto expanding, sidebar items have an arrow character indicating that there are menu options underneath and you long press or right click to reveal.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Closed Caption Sizes on tvOS

I’m being dense I’m sure, but where do I find the setting to customize the sidebar? I’ve got a Personal Section set up properly, but now don’t know where I go to configure the sidebar. I’ve poked around in the server settings but can’t find it.

In the CDVR web admin, click Settings → Clients and then scroll all the way down.

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Thanks again for this. But how do we limit Channel Collections by Genre?

In the collection using automatic rules

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Ah yes, of course. Thanks

As always, be sure you're on the latest pre-release. Things are moving fast.

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I just realized you can kind of simulate my earlier idea about putting spacers between personal sections right now, as you can see in the screenshot. This one is not a mockup, it's actually on my AppleTV.

I made a new flow personal collection, made the name a single space using the spacebar, and changed the icon to something not already being used. (For my actual setup I'm using the circle icon since I don't use the recordings tab.) For the content type I'm using something that will come up empty (in my case, video groups). To make a second spacer, you just use two spaces for the name, then three spaces, etc...

The downsides are there is still an icon there, which isn't too bad when the sidebar is shown, but the minimized version will still look crowded. And, the blank spaces don't actually get skipped as you scroll over them.

This is a great idea, thanks! Just now I did the same, to tinker around and see how it feels. We do use Video Groups a lot though. So to force an empty tab, instead I just slapped together a random Smart Rule that would never, ever find a match :joy:

Here's a custom grid of the many buttons in my "Apps" tab:

Why is this so fun? :star_struck: :joy:

P.S. Updated URL Schemes listed here.

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Living up to the feature's name, I created a Personal Section for a family member with very specific taste. It's a one-stop-shop for them to be able to quickly choose what to watch:

1 - Recently Added Movies
2 - Button shortcuts to various other parts of the app (Up Next, Collections, Playlists)
3 - Game Shows - On Now
4 - Martial Arts (boxing, wrestling, MMA, etc.) - On Now
5 - Unwatched Documentaries in library
6 - 4K movies in library
7 - Top Rated movies in library
8 - Recently Updated Shows

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As of the latest TestFlight beta, Personal Sections are now available for Start Up, Remote Shortcuts, and launchable via the Channels API and Deep Links.

They are not yet available from Siri Shortcut actions, but they will come later.

Note: personal Sections will be prioritized over native sections. So if you have a Personal Section with the same name as a native section, I.e. Movies, your Personal Section will be used.

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Would be really great if we could have a one touch system from the personal sections. Meaning, every time I select a channel that’s currently playing from “channel collections”, it pulls up the submenu of “watch now, record, etc”. Would be great if we could just click the thumbnail and jump straight into the channel like when we select something from guide.

I have a home automation setup using Keyboard Maestro using the remote trigger feature. This allows me to fire off macros from any browser by entering a specific url. You can also use a curl command in terminal.

When I setup a URL button in a personal section url row to send this url it not seem to go out to the WAN. Is this a limitation in the URL button that it can only launch apps on the ATV?

I suspect the answer is no but I just wanted to check in case Channels can send a curl within the app. Maybe this limitation is related to why Apple does have a browser for AppleTV (other than the fact it would be a terrible user experience).

Yes.

As tvOS does not have a browser, the only URLs it will ”open” are deep links or universal links to other apps.

When this feature makes it to iOS, it will open the links with the default system browser.

So even then, it won’t do what you want.

The URLs for buttons are links, they’re not just http requests that are made in the background.