[gdesmottt]

I find the 'Recently Added' menu for TV shows not very useful. Most of the time it displays either the latest episodes from a show (which I may not want to watch if I didn't watch all the previous episodes first) or it is cluttered by all the episodes of the season of a specific show I just added.

I think displaying only shows that the user may be interested to watch *right now* would increase the user experience of this menu.

Let's say that 'an episode E is watchable if and only if all the episodes before E have been watched' (so any S01E01 episode would be watchable as there is no episode before it).

The replacement for the 'Recently Added' menu ('Suggestions' maybe?) would only display episodes which are watchable. This would fix two issues from the current menu:
- The menu being full of all the episodes of a newly added season
- The menu suggesting me to watch the S03E04 episode of a show while I didn't finish watching the first season yet.

As the number of shows displayed in this menu are very limited we could increase the chance of displaying an episode that the user is actually going to watch by using some heuristic to order watchable episodes.
Let's say that 'a show is active if contains at least one episode tagged as watched'.
- An episode from an active show has a higher priority than one from an inactive show
- An episode from an active show has a higher priority than one from another active show if its latest episode has been watched more recently
- An episode recently added to the library has a higher priority than one being in it since a while.

With this kind of filtering and ordering, it's much more likely that user will find the next episode is was planning to watch.

What do you guys think about all this? If anything, could it be done as a plugin to experiment first?

[Montellese]

There's an addon providing skins with a way to integrate what you are looking for but I don't remember the name. It's present in a lot of skins like Aeon Nox etc.

[Kib]

I liked this suggestion and since I have used Skin Widgets as a means to get random items working again in Frodo, it seemed logical that this could be added to that addon.
As I was looking for the thread I suddenly found the wiki page with describes a feature I was not familiar with called 'Recommended'.

It seems this has already been created, and can be implemented by using the RecommendedEpisode tags (wiki) from Skin Widgets (forum thread).

I personally can't believe I overlooked this and will be adding this as an option to Neon shortly.

If you want this to be present in an existing skin, ask the skin developer to implement it.

[gdesmottt]

I tried the 'Aeon Nox' but didn't find this specific feature. Do I have to enable it manually or is it hidden somewhere?

[Kib]

You should really take that question to the Aeon Nox forums.
It is not hard to implement or modify in a skin that already has 'random items' - I hacked it into Neon yesterday but need some more time to properly integrate it.

[texaco]

An interesting approach would be to integrate grouping logic in Latest episodes. So if certain amount of episodes from a show (3+) is added at the same it could be displayed as one item.

As you mention, adding a whole season messes up the Latest episodes (home screen)

[mark99]

Plex has something like this with it's "On deck" list which ties to predict what to watch next based on what was previously viewed. But to be honest I never quite trust it to get it right (not least because I use XBMC mostly).

The simplest and most useful solution IMHO is a simple "jump to" which takes you from the recently added episode to its entry in the season listing in the main TV/Movie section. Then you can easily see what's the last episode watched, view the episode synopses, etc. This is what I end up doing manually most of the time, to find which is really the next unwatched episode, so it would be great to have this automated.

[Martijn]

Plex has something like this with it's "On deck" list which ties to predict what to watch next based on what was previously viewed. But to be honest I never quite trust it to get it right (not least because I use XBMC mostly).

The simplest and most useful solution IMHO is a simple "jump to" which takes you from the recently added episode to its entry in the season listing in the main TV/Movie section. Then you can easily see what's the last episode watched, view the episode synopses, etc. This is what I end up doing manually most of the time, to find which is really the next unwatched episode, so it would be great to have this automated.

searching would have told you most skins use an addon that provides this

[mark99]

Provides which? I'm interested in being able to jump to the season listing from a show in recently added in the default Confluence skin. Searching these forums, the Confluence subforum, and browsing the System->Settings->Add-ons list didn't turn up anything, so perhaps you can enlighten me of the name/location of such an add-on?