Is there an easy way to add trailers to my ripped movies? I have copied the youtube url into the "trailer URL" section but it never actually plays on my clients which I are AppleTV 4k's on most recent TV OS (haven't bothered with my other streamers yet.)
This can't be that hard lol
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That field takes a url to a video. The url in your screen shot is a URL to a web page.
. . .When did the option to link trailer URL get added? I must of missed that update. Is it ios only or android too.
Any limits to type of videos/etc
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This was added a while back. I believe that only Apple TV an iOS will take advantage of it. Any video format that Channels can play, will play. All it does is hand the URL to the video player in Channels, and it plays it.
Ok that makes sense. So, idiot question- how to find the video url from YouTube?
Nevermind I figured it out lol.
Kindly please share with the rest of the class 
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Well, it worked for a few minutes... Then it stopped. I will keep messing with it and once I have it working fully I will update the thread.
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Using tools to fetch an HLS url from them won't work, as those URLs are ephemeral. You'd have to do it at the time of trying to play it back.
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Yes
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I've seen some some creative approaches discussed, one common workflow involves running youtube-dl on your server to download the files locally. This can get a little complicated though. Some other discussion about that here.
There isn't any "pointing to it" via metadata editing. If you have a local trailer file, not on the web, just put that file alongside the movie file in your Channels DVR imports directory. Naming it appropriately is enough to do the trick. This is working for me, at least on tvOS.
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IMO a better source for movie trailers is hosted by Apple here: https://trailers.apple.com/
They don't have every movie, but they sure do have a lot of them.
Here is an example page of a trailer page recent film:
Using an extension like "Download HLS Streams" on Chrome or "The Stream Detector" on Firefox, one can easily determine the movie file's URL, In this case it's this .m4v file:
Paste that into the "Trailer URL" field in Channels DVR's web admin's page for this movie in your library, and the tvOS client will show it in the info screen and stream the trailer from Apple's server. Sweet!
I've just noticed a problem with this method though, the Trailer URLs aren't sticking around, so I posted some feedback in the beta thread. I think it might be a bug, hopefully can get fixed because when it works it's really cool!
I wanted to say thank you for posting this! I followed your directions and was actually able to get trailers to work in Channels using apple trailers. I really wish i knew how to do it using youtube as there are a ton of trailers missing from apple. I wish Channels would figure out a way to automatically link to the online trailers like Kodi does.
With that said, I can confirm that I am experiencing the same bug as you. The trailers url is disappearing from the Metadata shortly after saving.
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Thanks! Please report your experience in the BETA thread too, hopefully this can get fixed.
So thanks to @Fofer suggestion, I have found if you download the trailer and use the "XXX-trailer.mp4" (or whatever file extension is applicable, minus the quotes) it works quite well.
I have had family issues to deal with for a bit now, so haven't had a chance mess with this much anymore lately.
Hopefully soon I can try the other suggestions.
#grateful for such an amazing community though. Glad to be a part of it.
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I've gone through and used a scraper to add a trailer in the '-trailer' format for all the movies in my library. This is being picked up in channels with trailers now playing.
I have noticed, however, that the seek bar at the bottom is not behaving as expected during trailer playback - i.e. i'm not able to manually seek to a point in the trailer. If this were a movie, i'd go and select the fix video timestamps option to correct it, but this isn't an option with trailers. Any ideas?
What playback device? What file format? What happens when you try to seek?
Apple TV, trailer in mp4 format. When I try to manually seek across the timeline, it just continues playing from the point it was at. Interestingly, if I hard click the remote to advance 30 seconds, that works fine.