Lightweight collections

Channels DVR Server Feature Requests
#1

Collections have their value, but they are somewhat "heavyweight" (eg they take up a lot of UI space).
For many purposes (eg only two or three movies in a series - think eg Get Shorty, then Be Cool) what would probably work better is the sort of lightweight grouping offered by some other library apps, where you group the two or three movies together, and they appear as a single unit in the primary UI (perhaps with a slightly modified poster art that looks like a stack of two or three items).

Obviously this requires a little thought as to display purposes (in which views do you display the separate movies, in which do you display the stack?) but I don't think this is an impossible problem. Start with the heuristic of "if there's one movie that fits the view, display it; if two or more, display the stack" and work from there...

I'm not criticizing collections - for large groupings they are great. But they take up so much space, and are simply not a good practical (and quick to create...) way to tie together just two or three movies.

BETA: Sort Titles
#2

While not quite what you are looking for, you can at least force the movies to appear together. You can edit the metadata to rename the movies, so that they are sorted sequentially, for instance:

  • Indiana Jones 1: Raiders of the Lost Ark
  • Indiana Jones 2: Temple of Doom
  • Indiana Jones 3: Last Crusade
  • Indiana Jones 4: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

(Alternatively, I believe if your filesystem supports linking, you can instead create a link named for the new sort title, which will keep both entries in your library.)

#3

Even better. I just added Sort Titles for TV Shows and Movies.

Now, you can just go edit the Sort Title for something, and it will be used when sorting. It of course falls back to using the Show name or Movie title if it doesn't exist.

So if you want to group things together, check out the Sort Title. This is available on iOS/tvOS, but we'll get it in Android soon.

#4

I'm glad to see this. But, per my depressing experience with losing movie categorization for the second time in a year (as in my other post yesterday), I expect I will not be bothering to make use of it, except insofar as it falls out of automatic metadata.

I just can't justify spending much time prettifying my library when I know that it can all be lost so easily :frowning:

#5

How exactly did you lose your edits? Did you move your content and re-import it?

There's no reason edits would just be lost.

#6

What was last was, among other things, labels and being marked as in the Kids library (which I use as the only easy way Channels gives for allowing me to segregate "Library" (stuff I have watched) from "Upcoming" (stuff I want to watch).

The first time was moving all the files to a larger disk.
The second time was re-arranging the folder hierarchy. (Think, eg, splitting "Animation" into Animation/Pixar, Animation/Disney, and Anaimation/Other).

As you said, the rearranged hierarchy (in the second case) presented as each movie appearing twice, and a Pruning of the library resulted in the first set of imports (with the labels and similar metadata disappearing).

The first case was a while ago and I can't remember the detail but I think it was essentially the same thing. I had to change the Library path for the new bigger drive, and probably again forced a pruning after seeing so many duplicates.

#7

You can’t move your videos files after you’ve indexed them with Channels DVR Server. It has no idea you moved them.

You didn’t lose metadata edits, you lost the records in the library completely. Channels DVR Server just indexed the files again at their new location as new files, that’s why there were duplicates. Pruning just removed the old records because the file was no longer at the path it expected to be at.

#8

Is there a way to move file locations without loosing metadata?

After I did a lot of FileBot rearranging i have had to re-edit stuff. Like @Maynard_Handley i just havent been as motivated to redo stuff a second time.

#9

I was thinking a persistent records setup such as….

If the file for a particular show/movie goes missing from its expected monitored location then the record remains but becomes hidden. If a file (any file) for the that particular show/movies appears in a monitored location then the orphaned record is assigned to that file and becomes unhidden. Orphaned records could be removed after a reasonable amount of time (say 30 days). That would allow for file moves between monitored locations and slight file renames.