Just checking in here. Watching my wife navigate Gilmore girls (before I run out of the room so I don't have to listen to the annoying banter from the characters) she said to me, "Why can't I see one entry for Gilmore girls seasons, and then see shows that are like that showing around the one Gilmore girls entry, so I can see what else (our daughter) and I might want to watch, like with movies?" I told her that I don't want her watching anything like Gilmore girls, and this is a system for Star Wars movies, but she raises a good point... just a simple consolidated popup with a return control in the top left, then clicking on a cover gets us the current popup that shows what we now see for each individual season... I think it could work nicely.
-
Thanks for visiting the Kaleidescape Owners' Forum
This forum is for the community of Kaleidescape owners, and others interested in learning about the system, equipment, services, and the company itself.It is run by a group of enthusiastic Kaleidescape owners and dealers purely as a service to this community.
This board is not affiliated in any way with Kaleidescape, Inc.
For official technical support, product information, or customer service, please visit www.kaleidescape.com -
You are currently in "Guest" mode and not logged in with a registered account.
The forum is free to use and most of the forum can be used by guests who are not registered....
... but we strongly encourage you to register for a full account. There is no cost to register for a full account.
Benefits of registering for a full account:
- Participate in the discussions! You must have a registered account to make posts on the forums. You will be able to start your own thread on a topic or question, or you can reply to other threads/discussions.
- Use the "Conversation" feature (known as "private messaging" on other forums) to communicate directly with any of the other users here.
- Access the Files area. The "resources" area of the forum contains many "Favorite Scene" and Script files that can dramatically increase the enjoyment of your Kaleidescape system. Go directly to great scenes in your favorite movies, created by other owners, and add automation to playback of your system with Scripts.
- You won't see this annoying notice at the top of every screen!😊
🔵 TV Series- Consolidate to single title
- Thread starter iansilv
- Start date
Ha... love the Gilmore Girls vs. Star Wars discussion. I will claim that I have only watched Gilmore Girls because of my daughter, but the truth is that I actually really liked the series on its merits. It's kinda TV "comfort food" in our family.
On to the real issue, I still have a tiny bit of hope that Kaleidescape will someday fix this, but it's been like 15 years and they have commented as recently as within the last 2 years that they feel this is a bigger issue than we can realize and they can't prioritize it. They know it's an issue, but have other things to work on. I wish we could show that there are enough people like me that won't buy TV series on Kaleidescape due to this horrendous UX to make it worth their while to fix it, but so far I've been unsuccessful lobbying for this.
Kinda losing hope... they will get my money for movies, but never for TV series as the clutter on my onscreen UI and other operational issues make it so unpleasant that I'll happily use streaming services and Apple TV purchases for TV shows.
We can try tagging @MikeKobb here to see if there's any update on this issue.
On to the real issue, I still have a tiny bit of hope that Kaleidescape will someday fix this, but it's been like 15 years and they have commented as recently as within the last 2 years that they feel this is a bigger issue than we can realize and they can't prioritize it. They know it's an issue, but have other things to work on. I wish we could show that there are enough people like me that won't buy TV series on Kaleidescape due to this horrendous UX to make it worth their while to fix it, but so far I've been unsuccessful lobbying for this.
Kinda losing hope... they will get my money for movies, but never for TV series as the clutter on my onscreen UI and other operational issues make it so unpleasant that I'll happily use streaming services and Apple TV purchases for TV shows.
We can try tagging @MikeKobb here to see if there's any update on this issue.
Last edited:
Mike, why not simply add a high-level choice of 1) Movies and 2) Shows? Seems to me this would dramatically reduce the metadata challenge that seems to be the holdup, and separating Movies from Shows would really help the current situation. Like others have expressed here, I don't plan on watching any episodic content on KS until the user experience is improved. Cheers, Jim
I like Jim’s suggestion as a temporary fix to separate the movies from TV shows. As for the bar to aim for, K can look at what Plex is doing on how they organize their TV shows. You click on the TV series and there’s a separate screen that displays the seasons. You click on the season and the episodes are displayed. We don’t really need all the bells and whistles with all the thumbnails they have extracted from TVDB, but some kind of organization like that.
For now, I don’t buy TV shows for the reason that it clutters my Movie List. So separating the TV shows from the Movies is a step to the right direction
In addition to everything that's already been said, it'd be great to be able to tell at a glance which episode I've watched up to and what's next.
Noah Winter
Well-known member
This discussion triggered me to place all my titles into one of two Collections: Movies or TV. I thought this would take a long time as I have over 2000 titles, but I found on the web interface under the Movies tab a "Select All Button" and two buttons that I could move my titles all at once into one of these two collections. I followed the following steps:
This does not fix the issue with TV series not being organized under one tile, but it does eliminate the clutter this causes when you want to watch a movie.
- I created a Collection named Movies and one named TV by clicking on the "Create a Collection" button found on this page.
- Then I chose the "ALL" collection
- Select "All titles" to start with
- Click again to un-choose the checked box for any TV series, which was much fewer than movies
- Then at the bottom of the page I selected Movies from the drop-down menu of Collections
- Then clicked the "Add to Collection" button and all movies were now in the Movies Collection without any TV series
- Then I repeated Step 1 and skipped step 2
- I selected each TV series and added them all at once to the TV collection, and that was it
- I then went through each Collection to make sure I had got them all in the right place.
This does not fix the issue with TV series not being organized under one tile, but it does eliminate the clutter this causes when you want to watch a movie.
It's too bad they don't offer this on the main device. It would have been a good temporary workaround until a better solution could be developed.
I rewrote a description of this feature recently that I think clarifies the feature and makes it easier to implement:
Consolidated TV Show Interface:
Option for the Cover view to consolidate all the TV seasons under one Panel entry so visually the entire series looks like a single move entry.
Option would be in settings on screen interface as "Consolidate Television Series to a Single Cover"
This would be an option, and a simple implementation of the concept that would give those who want a way to consolidate their TV series collection a way to do it and for those who don't, they do not have to enable it.
When enabled, the following changes are made in the Cover view UI regarding TV seasons of the same series:
1. The cover art for the TV series panel on the covers view represents the entire series. The following options could be implemented as what cover to use are the cover of the newest season in the library, the newest season available on the Kaleidescape Store, the cover of the oldest season with the same choices, the most complete season in the library, or some other selection that would most visually signal to the user what TV series is represented by this one cover panel. I am not saying this choice should be a user option, just something to decide.
2. Name and description used in the small slide-out panel would be the general TV series name and description.
3. When clicked, the panel comes up that looks identical to the existing panel format, with the following changes:
- The first option under "Return" is "Play Episode" which when clicked opens to a menu identical to the existing side menu format like what is used under Play Scene in movie entries.
- Entries under this option are listed in order of oldest on top to newest on bottom
- Each Episode has its own entry for direct access to the episode. The episode starts playing when an episode entry is clicked.
- Exiting playback brings the user back to the TV Season panel with the "Play Episode" menu expanded
- Episodes are listed with their season and episode number before their title, "S2 E1: They said that to me at a dinner"
- Each season has its own entry to just click and start watching a season from the beginning.
- Seasons are listed simply named as "Season 1," "Season 2," etc. and they appear at the start of the list of episode entries to break up the seasons in the menu list visually.
That's it. I don't think the list view needs this option at least right now as it is much easier to scroll there, I suppose an option for this in the list view could be done some time in the future, but for now, this option in the covers view would make navigation a lot easier for people with large collections of TV series.
Consolidated TV Show Interface:
Option for the Cover view to consolidate all the TV seasons under one Panel entry so visually the entire series looks like a single move entry.
Option would be in settings on screen interface as "Consolidate Television Series to a Single Cover"
This would be an option, and a simple implementation of the concept that would give those who want a way to consolidate their TV series collection a way to do it and for those who don't, they do not have to enable it.
When enabled, the following changes are made in the Cover view UI regarding TV seasons of the same series:
1. The cover art for the TV series panel on the covers view represents the entire series. The following options could be implemented as what cover to use are the cover of the newest season in the library, the newest season available on the Kaleidescape Store, the cover of the oldest season with the same choices, the most complete season in the library, or some other selection that would most visually signal to the user what TV series is represented by this one cover panel. I am not saying this choice should be a user option, just something to decide.
2. Name and description used in the small slide-out panel would be the general TV series name and description.
3. When clicked, the panel comes up that looks identical to the existing panel format, with the following changes:
- The first option under "Return" is "Play Episode" which when clicked opens to a menu identical to the existing side menu format like what is used under Play Scene in movie entries.
- Entries under this option are listed in order of oldest on top to newest on bottom
- Each Episode has its own entry for direct access to the episode. The episode starts playing when an episode entry is clicked.
- Exiting playback brings the user back to the TV Season panel with the "Play Episode" menu expanded
- Episodes are listed with their season and episode number before their title, "S2 E1: They said that to me at a dinner"
- Each season has its own entry to just click and start watching a season from the beginning.
- Seasons are listed simply named as "Season 1," "Season 2," etc. and they appear at the start of the list of episode entries to break up the seasons in the menu list visually.
That's it. I don't think the list view needs this option at least right now as it is much easier to scroll there, I suppose an option for this in the list view could be done some time in the future, but for now, this option in the covers view would make navigation a lot easier for people with large collections of TV series.
Transepoch
Well-known member
I would think brining content sets to the list view at the same time would make it easier for them to implement. Just because it's easier to scroll past in list view doesn't mean you should have to.
It should also indicate the last episode watched, or have an option to Play Next Episode.
Kaycee2000
Well-known member
I'm new to kscape, and I have to say, im surprised this has never been done. The current UI seems quite antiquated and lazy imo. I really hope the devs pay attention to this thread.
Hope so too, but have given up. It's been 13 years we've all been complaining about this, and there's never been any progress towards this. TV series watching on streaming platforms is exploding in popularity and usage... and Kaleidescape users, who are used to top-notch viewing experiences, are left with a ridiculously antiquated and ugly UI. It just doesn't fit the brand image the company is trying to create. They should abandon it like they did music playback if they can't make it world class. Or at least announce they're working on it, giving us some hope.
Kaycee2000
Well-known member
Are we complaining in the wrong place maybe? Is there a way for us to get feedback from the devs about whether they are even considering it?
They see these. See above in this thread where @MikeKobb replied on this in 2015 and again in 2021. He's explained how complicated this would be to for them to fix.
Kaycee2000
Well-known member
Lol between 2015 and now they could have done it. Leaving it antiquated is really not a good answer.