Deep down menu rabbit hole

Channels DVR Server
#1

Discovered an issue when playing recordings on the ATV. I go to a show in up next, click more shows, then watch one. When that show is done I click more shows and watch another, then when that one is over I click more shows and watch that one. At the end of the show I get the up next display again and describe to watch something else and press the menu button to go back, but that takes me to another up next screen for the same show, press back again and I’m stuck in another up next for the same show… see the rabbit hole of menus?

I think the up next menu system needs to only have one logical level of depth because this is confusing when it happens and feels like the software is messed up.

#2

I’ve seen this as well and, frankly, have struggled how best to describe this behavior. Nice job describing the issue and I also like your suggestion for the preferred behavior.

#3

Yeah… hard to describe but I’ve seen the as well.

#4

So, the thing is, recordings have their own view. This is so you can act on them with things like Mark as Watched or Delete. Since you can get to them all on their own (like from Up Next or Top Shelf), there’s a convenient button to let you get to their parent show to let you view all of the episodes. This is so you don’t have to leave the recording view and dig through your library just to get to more episodes of the same show.

@syplex - so, what you should be doing is, just clicking the back button to go back to the Show to see all of it’s episodes. By clicking the more episodes button, yeah you’re going to end up going deep into a hole.

That being said, it’s clear that this is still sort of confusing. I’m definitely not discounting what you described.

Thanks for bringing it up as being confusing!!

#5

@maddox In this case I started in the main up next screen so clicking back wouldn’t go to all of the episodes it would instead go back to the main screen with all shows and up next.

My suggestion would be to do the following, when you click show more episodes it could look up the history stack to see if the “all episodes” page was visited recently, if so it deletes that entry from the history stack. It would do the same thing for the recording view of an episode. I think this would solve my problem and make the user experience less confusing.

#6

Personally I’d like the option to disable Up Next. Haven’t found it all that useful. Then again, maybe we’re being trained to watch differently?

#7

I would probably disable up next too, in its current form. I’d like to see a screenshot in up next along with the length of the recording and maybe the last and next episode for context. Right now it’s too textual and not enough visual so I don’t quickly know which episode it is even though it says the number etc. I see people say they “don’t trust” up next and I imagine it’s because there isn’t a quick visual context in up next like there is in the all episodes view.