Some additional movie feature suggestions

[PokerAddict]

First off, I love the system and it is the best in class. With those accolades, here are some additional thoughts. Although I'm a newbie, I have studied the K system for some time, recently purchased a system and have been using it constantly. After using the system for about a month, here are some observations and suggestions.

Movie features (some have previously been discussed):

(1) a separate category for trailers not linked to the DVD title of origin.

The current method for using trailers links a ?trailer? to a movie title. For example, if you want the trailer for The Matrix, you could set up a script and then scroll to Matrix and select that trailer as part of a movie experience. This is a great feature of course, but you have to know that this trailer actually exists. You could also select the Matrix from the movie list, cover screen or collections screen and then select its trailer. What you can?t do is see a list of all trailers available for your entire collection. A "trailer list" in the collections GUI and on the Scripts web page could, however, come from 2 sources. First, it could consist of those trailers already marked by K for each DVD title having a trailer for that title. Second, user-identified trailers could also be added to the "trailers" collection. As an example, the DVD Running With Scissors has at least 6 trailers . One is for Being Julia. The Being Julia DVD does not have a trailer, but there is an available trailer on Running With Scissors. If I could tag the trailer (favorite scene of Running With Scissors) to identify it as a trailer, it could appear in the list of all available trailers. Another trailer is Spider-Man 3. To show this trailer, I have to create a script to separate it out from the pack and play that script or remember that the trailer is on the Running With Scissors DVD. These steps would not be necessary if I could tag that trailer to appear in a list of all trailers. This would also blend nicely with the suggestions of others of having a pool of trailers that could be randomly selected. The HD Net channel on direcTV has a 30 minute show called Nothing But Trailers. It's a great show. The K system could achieve that functionality if I could just play all or a select number of trailers, hopefully without too much step by step scripting.

(2) Some type of command that allows one to play all favorite scenes for a movie.

The current method to play a favorite scene is from the movie page itself selecting one scene and then the next, etc. I have set up scripts that are 10 steps long just so I can play all the favorite scenes for a movie. It would be nice to be able to play all favorite scenes without setting up a script, while also defaulting to the play next step ?skip? command using the select button option that exists in scripts. Perhaps this "play all" selection could replace forget scene? I haven't used that button and manage scenes from the web interface. I'm also concerned that a person may delete a scene unintentionally. Just a thought.

(3) another vote for some method of trimming favorite scenes

(4) an expandable/retractable list view of favorite scenes that defaults to a movie list. view

The current method of browsing favorite scenes shows the movie title and all available favorite scenes for each and every movie. This list is very long to browse if you have imported a number of favorite scenes and have an IR remote without the filter option. A quick fix is to list only the movie titles in the favorite scenes list and permit the user to expand the movie title to list favorite scenes for that movie. Consider that if you have only 25 movies with an average of 8 favorite scenes that?s 200 lines to scroll through, even if browsing by page use channel buttons. It takes a long time to get to the end, trust me. With an expandable view, you only have 2 pages to scroll through to locate the movie of choice. At least for me, the movie title triggers the favorite scene, not my naming of that scene. A further option would be some way to select, on the GUI, whether the entire movie list should be expanded or retracted for scrolling. That would provide the user the choice between the current method and the proposed change.

Keep up the great work on this forum, it is invaluable. Looking forward to some great new features on the next software update.

Pete

 

[josh]

Hi Pete, welcome to the Forums!

Great suggestions - I love your #4, as I have hundreds of favorite scenes now and it is definitely straining the UI and is just inconvenient to only have them all scroll by movie name.

an aside: PLEASE share your favorite scene markers with the group here. There are several of us who love to import other users' favorite scene markers and look for matches with our collection.
​

I also agree with the suggestions about trailers. A way to get them from other DVDs where they exist is a great idea... and would be nice to even have a way to view trailers for movies we don't own in our collections.

As for "Play all" favorite scenes - would be nice, but for me, a much lower priority. it's probably an edge case... i bet lots of people wouldn't typically use that. FSs seem more like "one-offs" to me... pick one and watch it rather than sitting down to watch all my FSs for a movie at once. If I did want to do that, at least it's possible via a script. So lower priority for me vs. your other suggestions.

Glad to have you participating here...

--josh

 

[cinelife]

Welcome Pete!! I'll ditto what Josh said.

Jim

 

[PokerAddict]

Here ya go. I've copied a bunch of scenes from others and combined them all together so it seemed redundant to post the copied ones. I'm working on some more now. This is what I have of my own right now. There are some scenes from Old School, The Grinch, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Running With Scissors (trailers).

 

[PokerAddict]

Another Feature

I had some people over for dinner and we were watching a couple of movies. Of course, dinner interrupted our movie watching. They had seen various features of the K system before we started the movies. When we took a break for dinner, eating in the movie room, someone suggested that I put on the trivia sequence. I had previously used the intermission button during the Movie Script that was playing so the cover art was displayed. After everyone left, I set up a script within a script which functioned to put up trivia when the Intermission button was pressed during a Movie script and it occurred to me that I could only use the Trivia/Intermission feature if a first script was running.

My suggestion is some type of control command that would allow direct access to running a predefined default script that can be defined by the web utility for that command. The player receives that command, and voila, the event sequence runs until the command is selected again. In most situations, I would set this command to run Trivia, while in others I might have it default to the cover art of the movie (same as intermission) or maybe it would run another script of some sort, essentially some filler material in a loop fashion. This would make sense and be different from Intermission which only displays cover art. This feature could possibly be called Delay Sequence, Short Interruption, Short, or more appropriately Direct Script or Discrete Event (Direct Access Script or Discrete Access Script).

Food for thought.

This also begs the question of the possibility to purchase more trivia footage, if it's available.

 

[josh]

Here ya go. I've copied a bunch of scenes from others and combined them all together so it seemed redundant to post the copied ones. I'm working on some more now. This is what I have of my own right now. There are some scenes from Old School, The Grinch, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Running With Scissors (trailers).

Thanks! I got a match for Old School from this file... great scenes!

--josh

 

[lkesteloot]

(2) Some type of command that allows one to play all favorite scenes for a movie.

The current method to play a favorite scene is from the movie page itself selecting one scene and then the next, etc. I have set up scripts that are 10 steps long just so I can play all the favorite scenes for a movie. It would be nice to be able to play all favorite scenes without setting up a script, while also defaulting to the play next step ?skip? command using the select button option that exists in scripts. Perhaps this "play all" selection could replace forget scene? I haven't used that button and manage scenes from the web interface. I'm also concerned that a person may delete a scene unintentionally. Just a thought.

Pete,

You can go to the Movie Collections screen, to the Favorite Scenes collection, and press Play on the name of the movie (not the name of the scene). That will play all the scenes from the movie in order, and let you skip through them as you suggest.

Lawrence Kesteloot
Kaleidescape, Inc.

 

[josh]

Has that always been there Lawrence? or is that a recent change in the latest code? I thought I knew all the tricks... that's a great one!

--josh

 

[Oldred]

The most obvious enhancement for me would be that the movie extras could automatically be downloaded and accessible when you download a 4k version. Or at least downloadable without having to download the Blu ray movie as well. To a dumb layman, this doesn’t sound very hard to do and I can’t see a licensing issue because I have the rights. Sounds like an adaptation or use of an existing index and an option button or two. But I am a dumb layman.

Not critical but I would like the store to be able to download a trailer that reflects the format i.e. so you see what you are buying. A lot of the trailers look like SD still. It’s a bit like trying to sell a cashmere jumper but displaying a cotton t shirt version. Bit odd really.
I doubt this is easy but maybe just a very short extract of the real thing tacked onto the official trailer. Nice not essential but just common sense really.