It would be nice to have the ability to create a "Collection" of specific episodes, primarily for TV Shows (though others may find it useful for movies).
This is perfect for creating a selection of individual Episodes that are going to play for background or to entertain kids.
You know this is possible for Movies already, right?
Yes, I thought about that after I wrote it that I did not need to include that.
My request is specific to TV Shows. I know you can add a Show, but it adds ALL Episodes and I would like the option to cherrypick. Maybe more like a Playlist than a Collection in this context.
In regards to specific favorite episodes:
You can create a smart rule for a TV show library collection with "Favorited is true". Then mark specific episodes as favorites, and limit the rule to only your requested shows.
Or is there a reason that workflow won't work?
I did try that, unless I am doing something wrong, it appears to only look at the "Favorite" at the Series level rather than the Episode level.
If I don't Favorite the Series it doesn't pick it up at all regardless of how many Episodes I Favorite.
If I do Favorite the Series, it picks up all Episodes.
This was my experience as well, when I tried to create a Collection and Virtual Channel of just TV pilots from the 80s and 90s. I was hoping the Favorites feature could help but I couldn't get it working. I'm hoping we'll get more management tools on the "episode level" one day, because there's tons of possibility there.
Maybe a more scalable approach would be the ability to label episodes (and movies and concerts and anything else) with custom tags, not just "favorites." We could then search via those labels/tags and group content in all sorts of fun and useful ways.
If indeed you have favorited specific episodes but the rule is not selecting them, then I don't think you are doing anything wrong. I believe the ability to favorite specific episodes was added after smart rules to collections; the logic behind smart rules probably needs to be updated to account for episode favorites in addition to series favorites.
Of course, if your purpose is to create a virtual channel for background playing that consists of specific episodes, you can selectively add individual episodes to a virtual channel. While it is not automatic, it is doable.
Thank you, I may use that as a workaround until such a time as it possibly gets integrated in a more seamless manner.
I am trying to do almost the exact same thing as @rchannels
But I would strongly prefer to do this as a collection rather than as a virtual channel. This is so that the collection can be with my other TV Show collections, rather than off in the Guide (particularly for other family members' ease of use), and so that I can do it with a smart rule rather than manually.
@racameron suggested that:
IF this is correct, and IF updating the smart rules logic would allow for a Collections smart rule that picks out favorited episodes, THEN: would devs be willing to consider such update...?
Update to my previous post:
I just saw this other thread: Favorite TV show episodes virtual channel
And as explained there, favoriting an episode creates a Favorites section.
This provides the essence of what I'm looking for: A way to group together a manually selected subset of episodes of a show, within "Collections".
This works very well as long as what's desired is only one particular subset of episodes (which is my use case, at least currently).
For that use case, this favoriting method may actually be better than what I was tryng to achieve:
While it does not create a separate collection of episodes, it provides the subset right within the Show itself.
However, if I understand correctly, this method would not work if there was more than one desired subset of episodes. That's where a Smart Rule that allows the carving up of sets of episodes any which way based on custom labels would be very powerful.
Playlists have just gone into beta. Learn more in the beta post:
Thank you, this combined with improvements previously made in Virtual Channels "Smart Playlists" to honor episode level tags, is wonderful!