Popcorn Ready - Chrome extension for Kaleidescape users

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Popcorn Ready v1.2.2 is now approved and published. Below are the changes since v1.2.1 that was described above:

• Catalog pricing is now much clearer
  • Titles you don’t own can show their current store price.
  • Sale prices are called out visually with a green price tag, so deals stand out quickly.
• New catalog filters for shopping
  • Max Price
  • On Sale Only
  • 4K Only (now available in catalog views for both movies and TV)
• New catalog price sorting
  • Sort by Price (Low to High) or Price (High to Low).
• Cleaner, more compact Filters window
  • The filter layout was tightened up to reduce vertical space and make options easier to scan.
  • Genre checkboxes are now easier to read (checkbox and label on one line).
• Smarter TV behavior
  • Better season matching for hard-to-match shows.
  • “Empty”/speculative future seasons are ignored.
  • Runtime totals for TV are more accurate (season-based totals).
• Media type improvements
  • Better Movies vs TV filtering behavior.
  • Export behavior improved for TV season/grouped entries.
• Catalog source improvements
  • Added option to view titles downloaded on specific Kaleidescape systems.
• Consolidate TV Series
  
  • Last but not least, I added the ability to Consolidate TV Series via a checkbox in the hamburger menu on the top right. This will make it so instead of seeing each season of a TV show as an individual card, you'll see just one card for the TV series and you can click to poster image to show all individual seasons. (See before and after screenshots below)
    
    

 

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v1.2.4 should be rolling out tonight via Chrome's automatic updates to extensions. The new features are listed below including aspect ratios showing in the movie cards, filters, and CSV exports. These are the same aspect ratios that Kaleidescape movie store displays.

Popcorn Ready 1.2.3 + 1.2.4 (what’s new since 1.2.2)

• Search results are much better, especially for title intent, actor/director searches, and typo handling.
• Aspect ratio support was added, including better handling when a TV series varies by season.
• CSV export now shows season-based aspect differences in a cleaner, shorter format.
• TV matching has been hardened to reduce mix-ups between shows with the same name (for example, older vs newer versions of a series).
• Improved cast/crew and related info reliability for enrichment.
• Delisted titles are now reconciled and hidden from full-catalog views so browsing is cleaner.
• General stability and data-refresh reliability improvements were included across these releases.

 

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Running out of ideas for improvements as I've added everything I can think of at this point. Version 1.3.1 is submitted and will start rolling out from Chrome store today. Unless I hear of bug reports or additional feature requests I think this dev cycle is coming to a close.

Don't forget to go to the settings menu and enable the screensaver (and wait a minute) for some whimsical nostalgia! Can you hit a corner???

 

[Woo]

Dude.. if it wasn't already cool enough, the DVD corner bounce. So good....

 

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Dude.. if it wasn't already cool enough, the DVD corner bounce. So good....

My brother said that they weren’t hitting the edges perfectly enough and it wasn’t as satisfying as it should be so I have tuned it perfectly in v1.3.2 and submitted it to the Chrome store.

 

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Oh, and once you have 1.3.2 and are playing around with the screensaver, you'll notice that it randomly chooses the order between DVD/Kaleidescape/Popcorn Ready bouncing logos so you'll naturally get some variety. But if you get impatient and want to cheat and not wait for a direct corner hit, you can always cycle to the next logo with the right arrow key.

 

[Woo]

OK.. so two things. One idea and this may only apply to super hero movies. The collection feature is great. Works for Bourne and Jurassic Park but, what if I want to watch all the Marvel stuff in release order? So, is there a way to group those movies together? For this, "Marvel Studios" would work but I'm not sure how other sort of soft-collections could work.

Second: are there preferred browsers you think work better than others? Obviously Chromium based but are there differences between them for your extension? I'm testing out Vivaldi and it works well but the startup time is a little rough.

 

[OUTATIME]

OK.. so two things. One idea and this may only apply to super hero movies. The collection feature is great. Works for Bourne and Jurassic Park but, what if I want to watch all the Marvel stuff in release order? So, is there a way to group those movies together? For this, "Marvel Studios" would work but I'm not sure how other sort of soft-collections could work.

Second: are there preferred browsers you think work better than others? Obviously Chromium based but are there differences between them for your extension? I'm testing out Vivaldi and it works well but the startup time is a little rough.

For the Collection feature, I'm using the collections as they have them in TMDB. They break up Marvel into individual collections so Avengers: Infinity War is part of the "Avengers Collection". https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/299536-avengers-infinity-war

I could manually override that and create an MCU collection perhaps but right now it's whatever TMDB has for the collections.

I really haven't done much testing on other browsers. I'll test out Brave and see how much it varies from my Chrome performance. I'm on a pretty powerful MacBook and the extension does load everything into memory so that searches are lightning quick. Is it just startup you notice slowness or during use on Vivaldi? I can probably tune the startup to not feel as slow.

 

[Woo]

Just on start up. It's pretty snappy afterward. Not a huge deal but I'm wondering if this could be a problem for mega collections.

 

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Just on start up. It's pretty snappy afterward. Not a huge deal but I'm wondering if this could be a problem for mega collections.

Thanks. Got this fixed. Working on cleanup and packing for 1.3.3 release. It's very fast now!

 

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The initial load may still take a few seconds but subsequent loads will be nearly instantaneous.

 

[Don678]

I love the extension (works great using Edge browser). It would be great if I could sort on total number of reviews (from any source) to see the most viewed movies. A large number of top rated movies are obscure with few views (e.g. Swamp Dog Get His Pool Painted - it is number 10 in Critics Score)

 

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I love the extension (works great using Edge browser). It would be great if I could sort on total number of reviews (from any source) to see the most viewed movies. A large number of top rated movies are obscure with few views (e.g. Swamp Dog Get His Pool Painted - it is number 10 in Critics Score)

Thanks!!! Let me see what I can come up with. TMDB has a "Popularity" but I don't really love that either. Do you like the Kaleidescape movie store's Popularity sort? Unfortunately, the IMDB API costs $150K per year I've heard, so that one is out of the question. Ha!

 

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I think maybe I'll offer a few options. Sort by the Kaleidescape popularity index. Also, sort by some sort of a mashup using a normalized Kaleidescape popularity + Rotten Tomato scores.

Could also allow filtering on the normalized Kaleidescape popularity or whatever I call this mashup sort option as well. So you could have all of the rest of your filters too and do something like a movie from 1990-2010 that is available in 4K that is less than $15 that is in the top 10% of popularity or top 10% of the popularity/tomato mashup ranking.

Hope that is helpful!

 

[Don678]

I think maybe I'll offer a few options. Sort by the Kaleidescape popularity index. Also, sort by some sort of a mashup using a normalized Kaleidescape popularity + Rotten Tomato scores.

Could also allow filtering on the normalized Kaleidescape popularity or whatever I call this mashup sort option as well. So you could have all of the rest of your filters too and do something like a movie from 1990-2010 that is available in 4K that is less than $15 that is in the top 10% of popularity or top 10% of the popularity/tomato mashup ranking.

Hope that is helpful!

Great idea. The Top Rated on TMDB also seems pretty valuable.

 

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I added a Popularity sort in v1.3.5 and that should start rolling out soon. I'll work on some sort of "Popcorn Readiness" ranking when I get time that will be a mash up of popularity and rotten tomatoes rankings. May even make that user configurable with a slider so you can tell it how much weight to give to Kaleidescape popularity vs rotten tomatoes rankings. I'll get these added to filters as well when I work on that.

 

[lujan]

I love the extension (works great using Edge browser). It would be great if I could sort on total number of reviews (from any source) to see the most viewed movies. A large number of top rated movies are obscure with few views (e.g. Swamp Dog Get His Pool Painted - it is number 10 in Critics Score)

I don't know what I'm doing wrong but couldn't get it to work on Edge.

 

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Great idea. The Top Rated on TMDB also seems pretty valuable.

Good idea. I'm going to preserve the following fields from my TMDB calls and then expose a sort of TMDB Top Rated where we sort by vote average so long as vote count is greater than 100.
"vote_average"
"vote_count"

 

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I don't know what I'm doing wrong but couldn't get it to work on Edge.

Hmmm....I don't have Edge on my Mac but I know some other users mentioned they are using Edge. Have you logged into the Kaleidescape Movie Store from that browser? Do you get any sort of error message when you click the icon to open the Popcorn Ready user interface?

 

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I don't know what I'm doing wrong but couldn't get it to work on Edge.

@lujan Below is what Codex GPT 5.4 suggested as possible blocks for this extension. Please let me know if you have any success getting it working. Thanks!!!

If you use Microsoft Edge, Popcorn Ready should usually work. But some Edge privacy settings can block the extension from seeing that you’re signed in to Kaleidescape, even if the Kaleidescape website itself opens fine.

Please check these:

1. Make sure you’re signed in to Kaleidescape in Edge
Open [Kaleidescape Movie Store](https://www.kaleidescape.com/movie-store/) in the same Edge window/profile where you use the extension.
If you see your library/account normally, that part is good.
If it asks you to sign in, please sign in there first, then try the extension again.

2. Check Edge “Tracking prevention”
In Edge, open `edge://settings/privacy`
Look for `Tracking prevention`.

If it is set to `Strict`, change it to `Balanced` and try again.
`Strict` can sometimes block the extension from using your Kaleidescape sign-in correctly.

3. Check whether cookies are being blocked
In Edge, open `edge://settings/content/cookies`

Make sure these are true:
- `Allow sites to save and read cookie data` is turned on
- `Block third-party cookies` is turned off for testing, or Kaleidescape is allowed as an exception

If needed, add Kaleidescape as an allowed site:
- `High-Fidelity Movies for Your Home Theater - Kaleidescape`
- `[*.]kaleidescape.com`

4. Check for privacy/ad-block extensions
If you use extensions like ad blockers, privacy blockers, anti-tracking tools, or script blockers, they may interfere.

For testing:
- Temporarily turn those off
- Refresh Kaleidescape
- Open Popcorn Ready again

If it starts working, one of those extensions is likely the cause.

5. Make sure you are in the right Edge profile
Sometimes people are signed into Kaleidescape in one Edge profile, but the extension is installed in another.

Please confirm:
- The extension is installed in the same Edge profile where Kaleidescape is signed in

6. Try a simple refresh sequence
After checking the items above:
- Open Kaleidescape Movie Store
- Make sure you are signed in
- Refresh that tab
- Close the Popcorn Ready tab if open
- Open Popcorn Ready again

Short version:
- Signed in to Kaleidescape in Edge
- Tracking prevention = `Balanced`
- Cookies allowed
- Privacy/ad-block extensions temporarily off
- Same Edge profile for both Kaleidescape and Popcorn Ready