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

[speedingcheetah]

@maddox

Personal Sections will appear below the main sections in the navigation sidebar. There’s no plans to change this at the moment.

Ok.. well, my hopes are, maybe, to make once custom section, and have all the rows in it want, in the order i want, and then i guess i have to disable all the other "native" section in the nav bar.

@maddox

As for your JS error, see what happens if you go directly to the web admin and navigate to the Personal Sections.

There may be an issue with that Personal Section that you were editing. You should be able to delete the problematic one. And I’ll look into what caused it.

That is what comes up when i go to web admin page for Personal Sections.... it shows only that javascript error page instead. Did not load anything else, could not edit my sections, as it did not show them.
I already restored from backup to regain function... i will pay more attention to what i am doing next time i edit something, and if it happens again, i'll hope fully have more info.

[maddox]

If you could try to make it happen again, and remember what you did or what the characteristics of your section was, that would be helpful.

[maddox]

I’ve got a fix for that issue. But we’re having issues getting build out at the moment.

[maddox]

Fix is out.

DVR Pre-Release Notes

v2024.06.28.1721 -FIXED: JS error when editing button rows on Personal Sections -REMOVED: PAC12 network

[Fofer]

@maddox

Or, create a button that kicks you out of Channels and into another app.

@jasonmcroy

I am really having fun with this new option. Added a screen shot of just some of what I have accomplished so far. Thanks Devs!

One question - you can see in my screenshot I have buttons now

Great feature! I love the ideas percolating in here

As mentioned above, I added these buttons to some Personal Sections:

AppleTV +: https://tv.apple.com/us
YouTube: youtube://www.youtube.com/watch

I googled around, tinkered a bit, and was able to confirm these work as buttons too:

Amazon Prime Video: aiv://
Apple Music: music://
Apple Podcasts: podcasts://
Carrot Weather: carrotweather://
CNN: cnn://
DirecTV Stream: dfw://
Disney Plus: https://www.disneyplus.com
Fandango at Home (previously VUDU): fandangonow://
Film Trailers (TestFlight: ) filmtrailers://
Fubo: fubotv://
Haystack News: haystacktv://
Hulu: hulu://
Infuse (video player app: ) infuse://
Max: wbdstreaming://
Movies Anywhere: moviesanywhere://
MSNBC: msnbc://
NBC News: nbcnews://
Netflix: nflx://
Pandora: pandora://
Peacock: peacock://
Plex: plex://
Pluto TV: plutotv://
SiriusXM: siriusxm://
Spotify: spotify://
Vimeo: vimeo://
Wall Street Journal: wsj://

There are some remaining apps whose URL Schemes I'm struggling to figure out though... maybe they don't exist and this isn't possible? Can anyone chime in with help on launching these apps:

Reuters TV ???
YouTube TV ???
PBS ???
Paramount Plus ???
NewsNation ???
Twitch ???
iHeartRadio ???
Qello Concerts ???
Hit Rewind (music video library) ???
Broadcasts (streaming radio) ???

In the meantime, I updated the "Launching Apps" section here:

Stream Link URLs

Stream Links Stream Links are a Channels feature that allow you to add content in your library, that launch and play in other streaming apps on your device. Stream Links appear in your Channel library as regular content, can participate in Channels library features, but launch in their corresponding streaming app to play. Info Stream Links - Channels — Stream Links Documentation - Channels Support - Import Content from Streaming Services with Stream Links About this Info This is a collecti…

This utility has been helpful too: Deep Link app for tvOS

Any more pointers appreciated. Thanks everybody!

[maddox]

Library Collections are now available as content types for your rows in your Personal Sections.

DVR Pre-Release Notes

v2024.07.01.1927 • NEW: Library Collections are now available as a content type in rows in your Personal Sections

tvOS/iOS Beta Notes

v2024.07.01.1927 • NEW: Library Collection support for rows in Personal Sections

[slampman]

I may be dense here but how do i specify a collection? I can create a button row but there seems to be no where to edit?

[maddox]

They aren't button rows. They're content rows listing collections, just like movies, tv shows, and episodes.

Create a content row, and choose collections as the Content Type.

[Fofer]

@maddox

Just like Channel Collections, they appear in the order you add them via the Server Side Section.

I'm experimenting and adding a few of Personal Sections, brainstorming ideas. This is great.

Unlike Channel Collections, I noticed that their order on AppleTV is not matching the order I've added them via the Server Side Section. Feels like a bug?

[maddox]

Weird very odd. I’ll check it out.

[maddox]

As of the latest server pre-release and TestFlight beta, you can now set rows in your Personal Sections to show all of the items of a TV Show, Video Group, or Library Collection.

So now we can easily turn a Movie Collection into a row of movies in our Personal Sections. The holidays are gonna be lit y'all!

Note: the Personal Sections editor is starting to turn in to a real mess. This got even worse with the latest addition. We'll be cleaning it up soon to be a little manageable with the form fields when editing rows

DVR Pre-Release Notes

v2024.07.03.2236 • NEW: Adds the ability to set rows in Personal Sections to show all episodes of a certain TV Show, items in a Library Collection, or videos in a Video Group.

tvOS/iOS Beta Notes

v2024.07.03.2247 NEW: Adds support for the new ability to set rows in Personal Sections to show all episodes of a certain TV Show, items in a Library Collection, or videos in a Video Group.

[jamesrw]

This may not be a bug but a programming choice, but I thought I'd mention it just in case.

I've made a flow section using my movie collections, as seen below:

Under Collections, I've set Action, Comedy, and Family collections to hidden. And when I go to this Personal Section (on the AppleTV) they are correctly not shown. However, as you see on the server UI above, all my movie collections show up on the editing page, with no indication of if I've set them to hidden or not.

It's not really a big issue, but it was confusing at first. So I thought I'd mention it. Maybe a badge showing which ones will be hidden might be useful?

[maddox]

Hmm, the reason is that hidden items are hidden by default on the client. But this is tricky because we give you the ability to pick the visibility of what’s showing via rules.

But it’s also annoying to have to manually re-hide hidden items for EVERY row you create.

So this is an interesting edge case I’ll have to think about.

As for the web, we never show hidden items so they show up. This is so you can always get to things to manage them.

But in this case, since it’s trying to be a preview of the client, we should probably hide them.

Thanks for pointing it out!

[speedingcheetah]

How do "Flow" type Sections work? I can not seem to get it to load on the client device when i select Content Type/Groups/ Video Group. Select a Video Group.
It just shows "Loading..." and spinning circle on the client.
Same if i select the TV Group Option, and select a TV show.

The Web GUI shows all the videos listed though. So it looks like a client side issue??

I like the Flow option, as it displays all videos in the whole screen,(not just 2 rows and a "more" button that then loads a full screen) and can set thumbnail style for art, so i can look very much like how Infuse has such a view.

It does load fine if i use the default thing it comes up with, Movies. Or any of the sections above the "Groups" section under the dropdown "Content Type"

[maddox]

Sounds like a bug. I’ll check it out.

[maddox]

The new content types are now available on the Flow section types.

tvOS/iOS Beta Notes

v2024.07.05.0200 • FIXED: New group content types for personal sections were not working in Flow type sections

[speedingcheetah]

Working good now.

Is there any plans to add progress status bars/Watched green bar on the bottom each video icon for videos in Flow type?
Like there are on the normal views?
Minor thing, but just something i notice that does not show in this Flow type

[jamesrw]

Just wanted to second that I'm seeing this too.

[maddox]

@speedingcheetah

Is there any plans to add progress status bars/Watched green bar on the bottom each video icon for videos in Flow type?

This is already in place, but the options were not available for the new group based content types that were just added. This wasn't available in Flow or normal section rows. It's been added in the latest pre-release:

DVR Pre-Release Notes

v2024.07.05.0316 • FIXED: Show Progress property was not available for for new group content types in Personal Sections

As mentioned, this should be working with movies, episodes, and videos already. Let me know if for some reason you're not seeing this.

[speedingcheetah]

That was fast! Looks good.

Keep up the great work!

I love this Personal Sections level of customization.