Observations & Questions after first 6 months

Channels DVR Server
#1

So I’m 6 months into my Channels experience and so far so good,it took me a long time to find a media server that could display and organise my purchased digital media alongside local files and streaming titles and the end result is (almost) everything I could of asked for but I’ve got a few questions if that’s ok?

1:Is it possible to change the region for metadata,I’m in the UK and our rating system is different to the US,I don’t remember when setting up my server been asked which country I’m in so presumably it can’t be changed?

2:Where are the Quality ratings sourced from,I’ve set up a Top Rated section but there are some dubious films that are highly rated,I’m sure Shang-Chi is a good movie,but better than Shawshank or Godfather Part 2?

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3:Every other media library I’ve come across stacks movies that are part of a collection together,ie trilogy’s and franchises but Channels doesn’t,whilst I understand you can create your own custom collections such as MCU or 80s action movies and these are ok to have in a seperate section it would make browsing so much quicker if say there was one entry for Fast and Furious movies instead of 10,and clicking or hovering over that would then display the further films in the collection?

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4:I’ve created 2 Content Rows on my main screen of New Releases and the aforementioned Top Rated,if I scroll through one of those then return to Movies the default sort view is changed to either Date released or Quality rated not Alphabetically,is this a bug?

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Thank you for reading and keep up the good work.

1 Like
#2

Bumping this in the hope anyone has some insight or wisdom.

#3

  1. I don't think you can set a region. For metadata, CDVR uses Gracenotes, and they are beginning to incorporate TMDB. I am curious about how UK and USA metadata differ.

  2. I am making an educated guess that it's based on Gracenotes. I'm not positive, but it seems like the logical assumption.

  3. YES! Please, dear god, yes! If that is not a feature request, it needs to be.

  4. The sort order should not change. I would recommend shooting a short 30-second video, submitting a diagnostic report, and submitting logs. When submitting bugs, you need to send the information via email to support. That is officially method. Posting that stuff on the forum is for community support, which CDVR has great community support.

#4

Thank you taking the time to reply,in regards to 1&2 I can live with these,the metadata isn’t different in the UK but we use a different classification or rating than the US namely U,PG,12A,15 and 18 which is something I’ve grown up with and my family understand,it’s just my OCD when I see NC17 instead of 18!
Again using Gracenote for ratings is what it is but I’d love to know what they’re smoking if they think that Bad Boys for Life is on a par with The Godfather Part 2!!

The main one is the handling of collections but having read similar requests on here I gather the developers prefer their method of handling them as opposed to the norm of automatically creating them based on TMDB collections that other Media servers do and including them in your movie library, instead of the Channels way of having them in a separate place with unconventional artwork.The only current solution is just to have each movie as a separate title but that makes a library of several hundred movies quite a struggle to navigate around.

As I say I’m more than happy with what I can achieve with Channels but the collections would make it perfect.

#5

I will agree i wish franchises auto stacked.

#6

We don't automatically utilize the "collections" that TMDB suggests for each movie because we use Collections a bit differently in Channels.

To us, Collections are YOUR way to group things together. Not only that, they are used in multiple ways throughout Channels as a tool to drive even more of our features with your custom groupings.

If we auto generated Collections based on what TMDB provided, it would just fill up the Collections in your library in a manner that we find unwieldy, for the way Collections work in Channels.

As you said, most of the collections that TMDB suggests are nothing more than franchise groupings. We do not believe that a ton of 2 movie groupings in Collections is all that useful. But, with how Collections work in Channels, you're still free to do that yourself if you want them.

That being said, we do understand that the franchise groupings DO have value. Especially with what was described in this thread in terms of stacking them in the library. So that may be something worth looking into for that specific case. Using the TMDB suggested collections as franchises, and using those to stack, rather than using them to populate Collections in your Channels library.

Thanks for this thread, as hearing stuff like this is always helpful for making decisions on how the product grows in the future.

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#7

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

#8

Franchise stacking and browsing has been added to Channels for Apple TV and iOS. Learn more here:

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