BETA: Playlists

Beta Community DVR Beta
#1

Happy Holidays!

We end 2023 with a feature we've all wanted for quite some time, Playlists!

As of the latest server Pre-Release and tvOS/iOS TestFlight beta, you can now create and watch Playlists.

Create playlist for a watch queue, or your favorite episodes, or a linear list of Marvel content, or just the Holiday Episodes from Friends. And of course, everyone's favorite, all of the Treehouse Of Horror episodes in one place.

Shots

Here's what they look like (so far)

Web Admin

Screenshot 2023-12-22 at 12.53.21 PM
Screenshot 2023-12-22 at 12.53.21 PM1920×1282 111 KB

tvOS

Simulator Screenshot - Apple TV 4K (3rd generation) (at 1080p) - 2023-12-22 at 13.04.49
Simulator Screenshot - Apple TV 4K (3rd generation) (at 1080p) - 2023-12-22 at 13.04.491920×1080 104 KB

How do they work

Playlists work almost exactly like Library Collections, except they're groups of Movies, Episodes, and Videos.

You can manually add any of those items that you want, or use Smart Rules to make them dynamic and have them be kept up to date automatically.

What can you do

Playlists let you watch a list of items back to back. Create a playlist, start an item, and it will continue playing through the whole playlist from where you started it.

You can manage the playlist directly, or add items to them wherever you can manage content in the web admin or client.

Work left to do

While Playlists work really well so far, there's still some work to do.

  • Lots more UI polishing
  • Ability to manually order the items
  • Ability to remove items from the client
  • Ability to watch the next unwatched item with a single button
  • Tons more!

Wrap Up

Ok, that's it for now. Have fun with these during the holidays. We'll be watching for feedback on this thread, but we'll mostly be taking it easy till the end of the year. When we get back we'll knock out the last bit of polish to get Playlists working for everyone as well as possible.

Thanks everyone!

18 Likes
DVR Pre-Release Notes
tvOS/iOS Beta Notes
Feature Request: Build Playlists
Autoplay Favorites or Playlist
Feature Request: Ability to create "collection" of specific episodes
Is it possible to create a DVR recordings playlist?
Custom Playlists for Locally Stored Content?
Combined Collections for all content types (Movies, TV Shows, Videos)
#2
#3

This is almost exactly what I was envisioning when I made this request. Thanks for this great addition.

Adding content manually and via smart rules works as expected, but is there a way to arrange a "Custom" sort? I don't see any grabber buttons like in Collections.

2 Likes
#4

Playlists in the web admin now show the number of items and total duration:

#5

Not yet. It's mentioned in the To Dos in the original post.

4 Likes
#6

This is great! I love that we can combine different types of media. After playing with it for a bit, I have a few wants:

  • Add sort by name
  • Add media path to smart rules

With the media path I could make a smart rule for Christmas items based on a folder and have my imported content automatically added to a Christmas playlist. And the same for kids shows.

Keep up the good work.

#7

Manual re-ordering was added when sort is set to custom:

2 Likes
#8

Love the new playlists feature! Would you please consider adding the following features as it would help immensely…

• Pull to refresh playlist from within Channels app on iOS/iPadOS clients, as you currently need to leave the playlist and return in order to update.

• Option to reorder playlist from within Channels on iOS/iPadOS as this would negate the need to go into the web admin to accomplish this.

Thank you for your hard work! Wishing you a very merry Christmas :christmas_tree:.

1 Like
#9

Will we see this for Android by 2025? Maybe with downloads too?

1 Like
#10

Notes/Requests:

  • Support for Android/Google TV and Phone/Tablet (Duh!)

  • Play in Web UI

  • When in Custom Sort, you cannot click on an item to open it. When in any other sort, if you click on an item it brings you to its folder, not the item's page (except movies). Still would be better to just be able to play straight from the Playlist, though.

  • When you create a new Playlist, it is called "Untitled Collection" instead of "Untitled Playlist"

  • Same thing when you deleted, it says "...remove {NAME} Collection?"

  • Same thing with "Learn More" button, it links to the Library Collections page

  • The description when you have no Playlists says you can add "episodes and movies", but you can also add videos.

  • As with Library and Channel Collections, need the ability to manually re-sort the order instead of being in order by last created and having to do copy and rename workarounds.

  • "Add Content" is... not good. This is a playlist, so searching is not the best. It should bring up the ability to select Movies, TV, or Video and then go to subfolders (especially for TV and Video) from there. Trying to find what I want requires knowing at least approximate names.

  • Search is also suffering from the ordinal number bug, but I think I found it is bigger than that. It seems whenever a number is followed by a letter, search cannot handle it. For instance:

image vs. image

  • Lacking AppleTV, I can't test this, but it looks like you can definitely add Stream Link content to a Playlist. What happens when it reaches that items? Does it launch the appropriate app? What happens after that in the Playlist if you return to the Channels DVR interface?

  • Also lacking AppleTV, I can't test whether it is following Allow/Hide Content rules for Labels.

  • If you only have one Playlist and delete it, you will get a javascript error. If you refresh, it gives a generic "Playlist not found." screen with nothing more to do there. If you have more than one Playlist, it seems to be fine.

image
image712×402 44 KB

  • I don't know how object handling is done in the backend, but it appears that Library Collections and Playlists are pulling from the same number incremental. My Playlists started off in the 150s and are already in the 160s as I'm messing around.

  • Need Global/Client Settings for Playlist behavior control, notably "Autoplay Next Automatically", "Autoplay with Countdown Warning", and "Do not Autoplay Next and Return to Playlist".

  • Another one is needed for what to do at the end of Playlist. "Stop" or "Start Playlist Over"

  • On the client side, not just "Skip to Next", but also "Go Back to Prior" on screen buttons.

2 Likes
#11

Fixed

These were all resolved in the latest Pre-Release:

Responses

Yeah, I have plans on helping this for both Library Collections and Playlists

You can, and they will serve as a way to create a sort of queue, but as with the rest of Channels, Stream Links have their limitations. Playing the item will take you to the app as usual, and that's it. With no way to know if you watched it or get back to the app, our hands are tied here.

:white_check_mark: It does.

This is known and we'll get it.

We have plans for providing these sort of options. As of now, (which is essentially a bug), playback of videos are adhering to the AutoPlay Videos setting. So if you have it set to not auto play, then it won't play through the playlist. Turn this off for now to have it play through the playlist as expected.

We plan on giving Playlists their own settings to let you manage the experience.

Yep, Playlists are essentially just Collections, but can contain Episodes, Movies, and Videos. You can tell by some of the copy leaking through that was just corrected :eyes:

This will be corrected once a documentation page exists.

AutoPlay is not supported in the web player, so continual playback of the playlist won't work.

#12

This is fantastic! Thank you for this. I have a probably dumb question -- does the play status of an item in the playlist inherit what happens outside the playlist? For example, if I load all seasons and episodes of Friends in "Evan's Friends Playlist," with the intention of watching the entire series in order, and then my wife watches an episode because she sees Friends in "Up Next" in the Library, will I lose my place in the playlist? I can see the logic in wanting it to work both ways, so I'm curious how it works. Thanks!

#13

Great concept, would also like to see the addition of a new category of smart rule for both Playlists and Collections. "Relative Dates" like (Today, Yesterday, This/Last Month,...) would be very helpful for news and time sensative programming.

1 Like
#14

Yes. They are played back as normal library items so all watch state events are still in effect. Playlists are just another way to watch items and everything about watching items in Channels is the same.

1 Like
#15

Totally agree and we do too. Not being able to make a simple playlist like “last 7 days of news” or collection of “movies added in the last month that are unwatched” is making us miss out on a lot of scenarios for both Collections and Playlists. We’ll work on it.

3 Likes
#16

The Add Content modal shows TV episodes by season and episode number but doesn’t show the name. Makes it really hard to find the right episodes you want to add.

#18

It was my understanding that Collections were going to be reworked to merge the two types - movies and TV - so that they were agnostic to the type of content. So if you wanted a movies only collection or a tv only collection or a hybrid of the two it would all just under collections.

Are playlists planned to replace collections or exist as a third grouping?

#19

Playlists are not replacing collections.

2 Likes
#20

Wow maddy, great work on this high demand feature.

2 Likes
#21

This was resolved in the latest pre-release:

1 Like