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🔵 TV Series- Consolidate to single title

I

iansilv

Well-known member
When scrolling through titles in the interface, it would be nice to have the option of not having to see all the seasons for television series you have on your system listed separately as individual season entries for television show series titles.

This concept could be applied in both the list and covers views.

For example, when scrolling in the list view through titles that begin with "S," instead of seeing "The Simpsons, Season 5, The Simpsons, Season 6" it would be nice to just see "The Simpsons TV Seasons" and when that entry is rolled over, it expands the way movie entries expand, showing all the seasons you have copied to your system. From there, clicking the select button takes you to the title page and you can select seasons there, with the list of episodes popping out in a side menu.

Same thing with the covers view. But instead of seeing the covers of every single disc for every series, you might just see the oldest season's cover that you own- or the newest, and the description blue panel shows what seasons you have episodes for copied to your system. So you would see "The Simpsons" as the main title, with "Seasons 1,2,5,6,7, 8" in the description text. Clicking would take you to the same title page as described for the list view above, where you would select seasons in that initial menu with the individual episode access popping out to the side like it does now.
 
The only thing one would really lose out on, I think, is for shows like Law & Order which have rotating casts and you only get 4 cast in the category so if you sort by actor you may not have one of the top actors in the current cast show up because it still lists Jerry Orbach who hasn't been on the show in years. Also the year would not be completely accurate.

I would be willing to give up that little bit of accuracy to clean up the TV shows. As it stands now, in the cover view, if you like Law & Order, the only suggestion one would get is another season of Law & Order, as opposed to bringing in The Shield or Criminal Minds, etc.
 
I'm going to bump this. Anyone have any other thoughts on this idea and how to formally suggest it to kaliedescape?
 
A "single entry point" for TV shows with multiple seasons would improve my user experience.

I suspect K monitor this forum regularly and may well be aware of this thread.

If this suggestion was sent to support I expect that a reply would be forthcoming. In my experience K has always replied to my communications.
 
The issue (at least from when I had talked to K early last year,) was that they wanted to keep things to established releases. So if the publisher released a multi-season set, then they would combine them. Hence leading to my suggestion of leaving binding points that let us choose how many layers to combine.

Otherwise, we are left to prevail upon them to combine the seasons and sets anyway. Sometimes it turns out better than others.
 
New to kscape (just set up 3u and m700) and loving it, but have the exact same request. Scrolling through 8 seasons of 24, 10 of Friends, 10 of Smallville and 7 of West Wing is getting a little cumbersome! :)
 
When and if they implement this, they might want to look at grouping the made for TV movies in with the shows where applicable. For example, not only do I have 5 seasons of Babylon 5, I have 6 seperate titles for the made for TV movies from the series even though five of them came in one "set," giving me 11 Babylon 5 titles to scroll through.

It would also make my "TV" collection on the collections page a lot less cumbersome and tedious to scroll through.
 
Definitely a "tweak" that is well overdue.

All those seasons for the same TV series take up a lot screen space with little benefit.
 
I have 334 titles in my Television series collection tab. This relates to 119 actual television series. Of the 334 titles, 35 of my series have 4 or more seasons. An option to group seasons together in one title, while adding an extra click to locate the season to watch, would be much better from a movie organization perspective.

Kaleidescape is fantastic for taming a large collection and is well-suited for watching a television series episode by episode. With more content being able to be imported because of greater drive density in a 3U server, having at least the option to toggle on or off grouped television series titles would be perfect as collections expand.
 
I like how it works on my Apple TV: Select the Show (in this case, Doctor Who), then it defaults to the last series watched. There's an option under the Show Name to select which series to view (Series 1, 2, 3, etc), changing the actors, episode listing, and even cover art accordingly.

Seems like a simple enough change, though I'd rather see it as an option to consolidate long shows (like The Simpsons), rather than an either/or across the board option.
 
My only additional comment is that I don't expect to be able to do this onscreen, but would be perfectly content to do this via the browser interface. I would expect that makes the proposition much easier to implement and would not impact the onscreen interface with another choice.

Now of course, this could sneak into the system tab of the onscreen interface as a global option as well. I would be really interested in the user metrics to see how many users actually go to that system tab, and at what frequency.
 
Bumping this again. It's becoming the single biggest annoyance now with Kaleidescape now that my collection of TV series on disc has gotten so large. Netflix made the change a while back to show multiple seasons in a single entry. Apple TV also made the change recently, and it makes SO much more sense now that you see it that way.

Really hope Kaleidescape is working on a change along these lines...
 
TivoSloth said:
I have 334 titles in my Television series collection tab. This relates to 119 actual television series. Of the 334 titles, 35 of my series have 4 or more seasons. An option to group seasons together in one title, while adding an extra click to locate the season to watch, would be much better from a movie organization perspective.
Click to expand...

Here's an update to my stats, one year later, after expanding my 3U to 4TB drives:
467 TV series titled entries
164 TV series according to title, not season
62 TV series with 3 or more seasons/titles
45 TV series with 4 or more seasons/titles

Moving from 467 entries to 164 entries would be a massive improvement. With some of the new TV series entries for me, I'm seeing some strange titling behavior that will require sending the DVD sets to Kaleidescape. For example with House MD I purchased the box set. There are 8 seasons. For some reason, for 4 or 5 of the seasons, the first DVD of the season is imported under the title "House MD (Complete Series)", but the remaining DVDs in the season are imported under the individual season names. Probably a DVD authoring issue. For The Tudors, the bonus disc is imported as "Complete Series" but the individual seasons are left separate. That's not a DVD authoring issue.

With 2452 "movies" in my collection, a reduction of 300+ entries by collapsing multiple seasons into one entry would be a 10%+ overall reduction in entries. In my mind, this would be a worthwhile improvement.

Kaleidescape is the best way to watch a TV series. We use AppleTV, Amazon Prime and Netflix for some TV series watching, but my wife always prefers Kaleidescape. For shows like House MD, she requested the complete series of House MD via disc using Kaleidescape because it's easier to watch compared to the streaming services.

A selection option to choose this feature in the web browser would be a welcomed improvement.

Jay
 
I would like to add that the cover interface becomes mostly useless on shows with many seasons as the screen is full of other seasons and not a recommendation of similar shows. I will have to run some numbers on my system, but if would venture a guess that it is similar to the above poster.
 
I checked out of curiosity. I am just a little behind Jay and won't be catching up to him until I get my second server online.

2100 Total "movie" titles.

326 "Television Series" Titles
114 Unique titles in the Television Series group
37 titles of 2-3 seasons
32 titles of 4 or more seasons
11 of my shows have 7 or more seasons.

This would reduce my collection list by 212 titles, or 10.1%.

After going through this exercise, I see there are a lot of TV shows where I am missing a season or two and expect that my TV shows will grow quickly in the near future, especially if I pick up a the rest of the shows on sale.
 
Same here. I continue to feel this is the biggest UI weakness of Kaleidescape and is starting to severely affect our usage. The UI is just a mess when one starts amassing a significant number of TV DVDs, as articulated by posts above.

The frustrating thing is that Kaleidescape solved earlier instances of this exact problem - movies that spanned more than one DVD were intelligently collapsed into a single entry. Then they did the same for TV episodes of a single season on a disc.... collapsed all episodes into one entry.
More recently they began collapsing "Bonus Material" DVDs into a single entry with the feature DVD itself.
So why they can't now extend that same UI convention to cover multiple seasons of a show into one entry really baffles me.

It will only get attention if enough users complain about it.

I'd be satisfied if I at least knew that someone at Kaleidescape were at least looking into this and working on it, even if they weren't yet ready to show or ship it.
 
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