Beta: Theater Mode for tvOS

Beta Community Apple Beta
#1

As of the latest TestFlight beta for the tvOS app, we've introduced the option to turn on Theater Mode.

Theater Mode lets you watch movies with trailers and an optional pre-roll, before presenting the movie to give you that full theater experience!

With Theater Mode turned on, every time you watch a movie via the Watch button on the movie view, it will play trailers, and then optionally a pre-roll video, before playing your movie.

But because it's Channels, there's of course some options here.

Tweaking Theater Mode

By default, Theater Mode is turned off. Turn it on at Settings > Playback > Theater Mode.

Trailers

Choose how trailers should be chosen before your movie starts. The options are:

  • Off - Don't play trailers.
  • New Releases - Show trailers from newly released movies in your library.
  • Recently Added - Show trailers from recently added movies in your library.
  • Similar Genre - Show trailers from movies with a similar genre of the movie being watched.
  • Similar Era - Show trailers from movies from a similar era of the movie being watched.

You can also choose how many trailers are shown. The options are 1 to 3.

Pre-Roll

Pre-Roll videos are sourced from Video Groups. Choose a Video Group to source a pre-roll from. A random video will be chosen from the set Video Group. These are great for Feature Presentation videos that are shown right before the movie.

Note

It's important to realize that a varied experience of trailers requires a pretty large library of movies. Work has been done to ensure you always get the amount of trailers specified in settings, and that they're varied.

But if you don't have that many movies in your library, you're going to see a lot of duplicated trailers and may want to just not turn Theater Mode off.

Beta

Please put this through its paces, and provide feedback about your experience with this feature, as we usually do here. Thanks!

1 Like
#2
#3

Theater Mode settings are now available via Server Side Settings.

#4

Here's some good YouTube playlists of theater pre-rolls to source from:

Normal Theater Pre-Rolls

Vintage Pre-Rolls

Even More

1 Like
#5

absolutely brilliant addition - thank you :pray:

here's another playlist too:

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#6

Two quick notes:

  1. when trailers and/or pre-rolls are enabled, I can skip ahead a few seconds by pressing "forward" on the remote, or I can scan through the video by holding down that same button. I think it would be more intuitve, especially over time as folks get used to this feature, for a single button press to skip over the video, and move on to the next.

  2. On the "Trailers" selection pop-up, the word "Similar" is missing an "i" in the Genre and Era choices.

2 Likes
#7

I like this. Especially since we've disabled the timeline and info bar stuff for these, so there's already a sort of precedent of things interacting differently.

1 Like
#8

The latest TestFlight build adds a few things:

  1. Seeking forward in a trailer or pre-roll will instantly skip to the next video.
  2. A new option was added to choose if you want your trailers to come from all of your movies or just unwatched ones.
  3. A shortcut was added to skip Theater Mode completely, by using the Play button on your remote to select the Watch button.

Note

The ability to turn trailers off has moved from the Trailers setting to the Trailers Source setting. This may disrupt your existing settings. You may need to re-adjust your settings. Beta life!.

Release

2 Likes
#9

I’m updated on TVos and on the server side and i followed instructions but I’m not getting the option for theater mode, or at least it’s not playing on my TV. I have enabled it in my client settings, but I’m not seeing anything on my Apple TV app.

#10

If you’re looking for a Theater Mode button, that’s not how it works. Just watch the movie from the Movie view, and theater mode will be used.

#11

While I understand what's happening, I've found a behavior that I feel would not be what most users would expect. Or maybe it's just my setup and most people would keep the defaults!

I've imported my personal digital movie collection into Channels. There are several hundred movies, so having them all appear in one long list is unwieldy. So I've disabled the default views and created two Personal Sections for movies.

I've put my imported personal digital movies into Collections and have them showing up in a Personal Section of Collections (named My Movies). I also have a separate Movies view for just movies I've recorded but don't plan to keep after I watch them (created with Personal Sections and named DVR Movies). I don't want the hundreds of imported digital movie titles I want to keep crowding my recently recorded movies I plan to delete. So I've set the movies in the Collections to Hidden, so they don't show up in my DVR Movies.

There's the problem! It seems like Theater Mode uses the visibility flag to determine if a movie should 1) be included in the list of trailers that might show up for other movies, and 2) have trailers played before it.

I totally get the reasoning. And I can't really think of a better way to have the feature and allow users to disable trailers for certain movies in their library, other than not using visibility but adding another flag for something like "don't include in Theater Mode". Though I'm sure that would mean more work and more code complexity when using visibility is less work and simpler code.

I'm not sure if there is a better way or if my use case is too much of an edge case to worry about, but thought I'd at least start a conversation.

#12

So a couple things here.

You can turn on a better browsing experience without having to resort to Personal Sections, by enabling Enhanced Library in your Library settings. This does a better job at displaying large libraries.

Though, since you have different goals in mind in terms of breaking up how your movies are displayed, and doing so in a pretty specific fashion, then Personal Sections are actually better for you.

I wouldn't say that this is an edge case, but what you're trying to do IS very specific.

And unfortunately, yeah, if a movie is hidden, then it won't be available for trailers. That's not something we'll change as the expectation of hiding a movie is exactly that, it's hidden.

But I think you should be able to achieve what you're trying to do without hiding movies at all. Using the Smart Rules, there's a field for Imported. This allows you to pick true or false, allowing you to filter the movies to just movies that are imported, and just movies that are NOT imported (recorded).

Use this field when filtering your movies and you should be good to go. There's no real need to use Collections at all.

Personal Sections
#13

Yeah I went to a movie and it didn't play the movie in theater mode. Just went straight to the film

#14

Please submit diagnostics from your Channels app after you experience this.

1 Like
#15

...You can turn on a better browsing experience without having to resort to Personal Sections, by enabling Enhanced Library in your Library settings. This does a better job at displaying large libraries.

Though, since you have different goals in mind in terms of breaking up how your movies are displayed, and doing so in a pretty specific fashion, then Personal Sections are actually better for you...

I may give Enhanced Library another shot since I turned it off soon after starting with Channels. But I think I prefer sorting my collection by genres and franchises and then digging down from there and Collections has been great for that. And by the way, Personal Sections is a great feature! I love the customization options you allow users.

...But I think you should be able to achieve what you're trying to do without hiding movies at all. Using the Smart Rules, there's a field for Imported. This allows you to pick true or false, allowing you to filter the movies to just movies that are imported, and just movies that are NOT imported (recorded).

Use this field when filtering your movies and you should be good to go. There's no real need to use Collections at all...

That's an amazing idea. Once we find something that works for us we often forget about all the features we're not using! I should have had a second look at what was already available. Thanks for the idea!

EDIT: Trying it out and so far it seems to be working great! Thanks again for the suggestion!

#16

I've got a suggestion for Theater Mode.

The vast majority of the time I probably won't want trailers playing in front of the movie, so this feature will most likely be off except on my dedicated home theatre client. But occasionally, I might want to watch something with Theatre Mode on a client that has it disabled.

Could you add an option to play a movie with theatre mode to the contextual menu when I press and hold on a selected title?

#17

No, because theater mode will be turned off with no settings. Your strategy of only turning it on for clients in more home theater settings is the correct one.

1 Like
#18

Ah, that's right, I forgot there were settings!

Maybe when the settings are enabled but theatre mode is disabled it could appear in the contextual menu? That's fairly clunky though.

It's a cool feature when needed though! I've actually been running a custom slide show on my home theatre Apple TV for years (link to my slides in case others are interested!) and this will be a nice addition to that.

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#19

That’s a really cool idea and hack for a home theater

#20

I just wanted to highlight this addition, it’s working great:

Because sometimes we want Theater Mode and sometimes we don’t, and with this feature I can choose on-the-fly without having to toggle any settings.

1 Like