Delete catalogued/imported movies after D2D?

[erixon1138]

I have a Strato C/Terra 24 and a Premiere system. No Co-Star for the moment.

I usually delete the catalogued Blu-Ray and imported DVD after I bought them it in the K Movie Store. I do this to clean up the Premiere system before I Co-Star the systems. But I accidently saw that this may not be a good thing to do. On movies that is available in different versions I can't get discount on the other version when I deleted the cataloguing. For example the Mad Max Black & Chrome edition and the regular versions of Lord of the Rings movies is now not available with discount.

Do you keep the catalogued discs or delete them? How do you do experience this? Is it annoying with all the double cover arts if you have Co-Star?

For now I download all content from the K Movie Store to the Terra. But the Terra is soon filled up so the plan is to delete the HD SD movies and download them to the Premiere system instead and buy a Co-Star.

Thank you for any help on this.

Andreas

 

[Transepoch]

I guess one theory might also be to drop the movie guide team a line and see if they can combine the copies, so at least you only have one listing on the Encore/Co-Star side (folding the cataloged copy into other versions.) If it's just cataloged, you aren't really saving any space, so doesn't feel like much reason to delete it unless absolutely necessary.

 

[SJHT]

Don’t delete them because of the reasons you mentioned. I personally think they should combine the D2D and upgrade pricing. It is strange when you upgraded from a disc to a store HD copy and then have to dig out an old disc (that you deleted) to get better pricing for the 4K upgrade.

 

[MikeKobb]

Greetings folks. So, good news. We have recently made changes to our headend software. The headend used to base its understanding of the discs you own on the inventory uploaded by your system. That inventory is updated fairly frequently, so if you did a disc-to-digital purchase and then deleted the disc version from your system to clean things up, the headend would quickly lose track of the fact that you own the disc.

As of the recent changes, the headend preserves knowledge of your discs even if you remove them from your system. This means that going forward, you won't need to worry about having to stick the disc back in the system if an offer becomes available. This is especially valuable for customers who may be in a situation, say, where a disc-based system experiences a component failure. Since this is the sort of scenario that often prompts people to update to a download-based system, not losing the records of disc ownership greatly reduces the hassle of making the conversion to downloaded movies.

There's an important caveat here. This change applies to discs that were on your system when the headend software was updated (which was March 10 of this year). Unfortunately, it was not possible to retroactively record discs that had been removed prior to that date.

 

[ht guy]

Thanks Mike. Good stuff.

If the user has lost interest in owning the disc, is there a way to manually delete it so it doesn't clutter the directory?

 

[MikeKobb]

So I can most accurately answer your question, what "directory" are you concerned about cluttering?

 

[ht guy]

Apologies. Talking about the digital offers section of the store as it sounds like (once deleted from the browser) they will no longer appear in the directory of a Costar connected Strato - which is great!
I've already deleted many titles from the browser, (as no longer needed there) but thinking we should not delete titles not currently in the store?
Thanks Mike.

 

[MikeKobb]

Ah, gotcha. No, the store will still show those offers as existing in those Manage views. There's not currently a way to suppress them.

If you had a disc for a movie that's not currently in the store, and you delete that disc from your system, if the movie later becomes available on the store, the system should still remember that you have that disc and will make Disc to Digital pricing available for you.

 

[ht guy]

Thanks Mike.
Assume the system remembering I own something not in the store at the time of cataloging is dependent upon the system recognizing the disc? If not, should we be good to go as long as we've added the UPC to the cataloged disc?

 

[MikeKobb]

We actually remember the disc by the unique identifier that we generate as part of the recognition process. As you know, when you enter the UPC code, our team attempts to find the information for that movie and link up that unique identifier to the relevant entry in our movie guide. A disc recognized in this way will not always be able to have things like the Play Movie bookmark and so on, but it would at least have cover art and a synopsis etc.

So, on to your question: If you were to import/catalog a disc that the guide didn't recognize and maybe you enter your own data for it or whatever, then you delete the disc, if at some time later that movie appeared in the store, you would be able to do a disc-to-digital transaction provided that at some point between when you imported the disc and when you try to buy the movie on the store, the unique ID for that disc has been tied to the proper movie in the guide data. So, yes, it should work.

Having said that, my recommendation would still be to wait until the initially-unrecognized disc shows up with guide data, because then you know that the association has been made. If you were to delete it before that point, and for whatever reason it doesn't get linked up afterwards, I'm not sure how the process would work to try to get the association made later on when the movie is no longer on the system.

 

[ht guy]

Excellent.
Thanks again.

 

[Transepoch]

Not my cup of use case, but then how do we tell the system we no longer own a disc, should we choose to physically get rid of it? At that point we should no longer be entitled to D2D (or other perks of token ownership.)

 

[erixon1138]

Greetings folks. So, good news. We have recently made changes to our headend software. The headend used to base its understanding of the discs you own on the inventory uploaded by your system. That inventory is updated fairly frequently, so if you did a disc-to-digital purchase and then deleted the disc version from your system to clean things up, the headend would quickly lose track of the fact that you own the disc.

As of the recent changes, the headend preserves knowledge of your discs even if you remove them from your system. This means that going forward, you won't need to worry about having to stick the disc back in the system if an offer becomes available. This is especially valuable for customers who may be in a situation, say, where a disc-based system experiences a component failure. Since this is the sort of scenario that often prompts people to update to a download-based system, not losing the records of disc ownership greatly reduces the hassle of making the conversion to downloaded movies.

There's an important caveat here. This change applies to discs that were on your system when the headend software was updated (which was March 10 of this year). Unfortunately, it was not possible to retroactively record discs that had been removed prior to that date.

Thank you so much for you answer and this feature. Great news. The Co-Star now ordered and I started with the procedure of deleting cataloged movies that I already have on the Strato.

 

[rbienstock]

I have a somewhat related problem that I need help with. I have a Premiere system and a 4K system connected via co-star. I have many more Blu-ray disks than will fit in a single disk vault but no space in my rack for a second vault. (This problem would vanish along with huge chunks of my bank account if the Criterion Collection ever made it to the store.) So I have BR titles on my server that aren't in the vault. Before the 4K/CoStar were added, you could easily identify which titles weren't in the vault because they were greyed out in the on-screen movie list. Once you connect the two systems, however, the unified interface doesn't show titles not in the vault. So it's a pain because now you can't really know if you can play a particular title from looking at the movie list. You have to select the title to discover if it can be played. Is there any way to either filter out unplayable titles or specifically identify BR titles that aren't in the vault.


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[MikeKobb]

Before the 4K/CoStar were added, you could easily identify which titles weren't in the vault because they were greyed out in the on-screen movie list. Once you connect the two systems, however, the unified interface doesn't show titles not in the vault. So it's a pain because now you can't really know if you can play a particular title from looking at the movie list. You have to select the title to discover if it can be played. Is there any way to either filter out unplayable titles or specifically identify BR titles that aren't in the vault.

Unfortunately, there's not really a solution for that. Within the Premiere system, there's a whole subsystem dedicated to tracking whether discs are or are not "present", and keeping it up to date across the entire library in near real time. That information doesn't cross the bridge to the Co-Star paired Strato/Terra system, so we can't do the dimming, and doing something like filtering wouldn't be possible for the same reasons.

When you open the details for a movie, the system makes a direct request to the Premiere side for that specific movie to ask whether it's present or not, and that's why we can display playability status in the movie's details page.

I'd love to say that we'll add the full presence information at some point in the future, but realistically given the scale of that effort and other development priorities, I don't think it's something that will happen, at least any time soon.