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🔵 TV Series- Consolidate to single title

Counting all this in my collection started taking far too long (only made it through D or E, forget which, and that is only of the stuff imported,) but if I recall the store is showing 500-something TV titles. Granted a lot of those are 1-shot kids titles they may decide are more like specials/movies that do not [currently] condense. However, it would be nice if they remembered providing a flexiible & convenient content management system is one of their primary goals ("The Experience" is the first subsection on their website afterall) even if the content being managed is not always theatrical. Not that there aren't an increasing number of movie-franchises that are starting to get up there in releases.
 
Fast way to count:

Export movies to Excel

Sort by genre

Go to beginning of television and scroll down to end of television, highlighting a column and check the count on your status bar in excel. Figuring how many series takes a little longer but is fast with them grouped by genre and then alphabetized.
 
As a starting point, sure. However, between titles that have a primary genre other than TV (or the few that shouldn't use TV,) all the multi-volume sets that aren't consolidated because they haven't been loaned yet, and then adding back those not imported are leading to a significant adjustment.

Exporting to Excel makes the process faster but it still takes time to tag the individual lines & note seasons per franchise.
 
Mr.Poindexter said:
Fast way to count:

Export movies to Excel

Sort by genre

Go to beginning of television and scroll down to end of television, highlighting a column and check the count on your status bar in excel. Figuring how many series takes a little longer but is fast with them grouped by genre and then alphabetized.
Click to expand...

I tried this and this is really quick and easy. It was especially useful to me on organizing my music since I have 3 times as many albums as movies (used to be 6X so I am making progress on the movie side).

John
 
COME ON Kaleidescape! I still believe this is the single biggest flaw with the entire Kaleidescape system. Why is there STILL no proper handling (grouping, to be more accurate) of multi-disk TV series into a single title?
This CAN'T be that hard...

Really wish I'd just hear that they're working on this and it will come at some point. Netflix and AppleTV handled this properly YEARS ago.
 
I would like to see a separate section completely for TV, much like the AppleTV interface, as others have mentioned. So, you would have a Music section, Movies section, and TV section. This would by itself be particularly useful for those that have large TV libraries as previously commented, and should be pretty simple to introduce.

Beyond, that, I'd like for the user to be able to consolidate titles. This would handle the TV problem, and some other movies as well. For instance, the Extended versions of the Lord of the Rings movies contain two Blu Ray discs for the feature and then 3 or 4 DVDs of bonus material per title. Presently, the system separates each movie into two entries, one for the DVD bonus material and one for the Blu Ray feature. I'd like to be able to merge the bonus material entries into the Feature title, so only one movie title appears in the list. And for TV series, the user could then merge each season into one title, and select his/her preferred cover art, select a TV series to view, and then the seasons propagate on the next screen.
 
JerryL said:
I think the truly biggest flaw is the lack of HD Audio decoding but I understand your point.
Click to expand...

yes, it's a contender for sure. :)

But it's my belief that the TV interface change suggested will be a big enhancement of the experience for a very large percentage of Kaleidescape owners, something they'll notice and appreciate every day. The HD Audio decoding is an extremely important feature for a small number of owners. I'd bet 90% of K owners would never know, request, use, or appreciate it if it were there. That said, Kaleidescape has always designed systems to be aimed at the high end aficionado, and for that reason, the highest-end audio decoding should be offered.
 
HD Audio - big development but would be nice as would the ability to use audio stored 'outside' of an attached player a real plus as whilst audio quality is good it is not the best by a long way so I use K-Music for ambiance music but never for 'serious' listening. I have all my music duplicated (ripped & HD downloaded) stored in FLAC on another server that is for my hifi listening.

A TV series interface as suggested would be great as having around 1000 TV series on my system I find it frustrating at the lack of this and having TV series treated like individual DVD's / Films
 
nothing. Disappointing, but not surprising. They're just not a company that comments about future features. Wish in this case they'd just acknowledge it's an issue and say if they are working on it, but they don't tend to operate this way.

If you've seen the new Tivo software released this past week, the new OnePass system is pretty amazing... aggregates every season of every show into a single entry, and searches across recorded shows, cable VOD, Hulu, Hulu+, and Netflix, and presents every episode from every season that is available to you. Click any episode, and it finds it via whatever means possible and it just plays.

My days of storing and accessing TV series on Kaleidescape (much less buying them from the store) are rapidly coming to an end due to the antiquated and inconvenient interface and their years-long lack of listening to what users want. AppleTV, Tivo, and Netflix make continual changes and improvements in response to the rapid rise of TV show consumption. Kaleidescape doesn't.
 
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josh said:
If you've seen the new Tivo software released this past week, the new OnePass system is pretty amazing... aggregates every season of every show into a single entry, and searches across recorded shows, cable VOD, Hulu, Hulu+, and Netflix, and presents every episode from every season that is available to you. Click any episode, and it finds it via whatever means possible and it just plays.
Click to expand...

What OnePass system software update this week? *reads link* Roamio-only? *shakes fist* You bastards.
 
Bumping to see if this has been addressed.... I love seeing all seven seasons of Gilmore girls with their covers...
 
If you've read all my posts on it, this is my #1 frustration of using Kaleidescape, and has severely impacted my family's use of the system, and therefore my willingness to keep investing in kaleidescape gear.

It's laughable, embarrassing, and practically unusable now to watch TV series on Kaleidescape if you have lots of seasons of popular shows. The UI just becomes cluttered and unwieldy. We just use Tivo now instead and it's pretty much magical. Or Netflix. Both have addressed this problem a long time ago.

I'm surprised Kaleidescape has had no improvement on this, no comment if it's coming, or solicitation of feedback on this. This is the #1 topic on this forum area, with 11,500+ reads and 35 replies, almost entirely supportive of a redesign on this feature.

I guess I shouldn't be so surprised... they've never implemented features due to user requests here on this forum or elsewhere. they do what they want, if and when they want it. It's not exactly a user-responsive company. Had hoped it would be different with Cheena as the new CEO, but such is not the case.
 
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Josh, I complete agree with everything you're saying. I first found out about Kaleidescape about 1 year ago. It was exactly what I'd been looking; high quality digital movies with great bonus feature support.

Unfortunately, the price was simply too high. I thought I'd wait to see if the price came down. I was super excited when the Alto was announced earlier this year, but at $2,500 it was still a bit too high, especially without full UV support from all studios and DMA support from Disney. I have a huge digital collection, so full studio digital rights support is a must for me. Not to mention that bonus feature support has really started to be lacking. I love bonus features and that was what initially drew my attention to K.

With all that being said, the one thing that has been the most disappointing to me with following K closely for the last year is that there has been essentially zero innovation. The Alto is just a rebranded Cinema One and as far as I know there haven't been any major updates to the operating system. I can see from this thread that there are many others that feel the same.

Hopefully K is listening to it's current and potential customers on these issues.
 
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I now have four separate covers for My Little Ponies: Friendship is Magic. All four seasons. Wouldn't mind if they were one cover with the option of selecting any episode from any season from the main cover...
 
I have a client who has every season of all the star trek shows. I cannot imagine how useless the cover function is for that part and also how much ST he has to scroll through to get to another title - I think it is 26 seasons or so.

I guess we need to perhaps just email these requests to Kaleidescape since they are not really responding to this thread...
 
They do monitor these forums. They just ignore any user suggestions here. To be honest, this whole forum section is pretty useless and probably should just be removed. But it's a place to vent frustrations.

I doubt emailing will help but go for it. Let us know what you hear. We won't hold our breath. :)
 
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