After trying out this add-on for a while I had determined that it's not for me and my set-up (though now I might take that back — see my [EDIT] further below).
For currently airing TV shows my set-up automatically downloads new episodes and moves them to the appropriate folders I have set for my KODI TV Shows library so they're scraped and added the next time the video library is updated (which is also done automatically). For some shows I want to keep the episodes — fine, I can just choose 'no' when prompted to delete — while for others, with more ephemeral content (e.g. The Daily Show or 8 Out Of 10 Cats) I want to delete them — mainly to conserve and provide enough space for all the content that I want to keep.
I use the 'Skin Helper Service Widgets' add-on which provides a very handy 'Next Episodes' widget. This widget displays the next un-watched episodes of in-progress shows that have been downloaded and are ready to view. However, if I keep deleting the last episode viewed of a specific show, the next episode that's downloaded and added to the library doesn't get added to this widget (even after refreshing the skin or restarting KODI).
I'm guessing that the only way such a widget can function is because it knows which previous episode I have watched of any given show and that info is not retained in the library database when there are no previous episodes present. As further evidence, the widget also doesn't pick up any new shows added to the library until one of its episodes starts to play so that the library database then has a reference point. That's also the only way I can get any 'next' episode to show up in the widget — i.e. by playing it for a few seconds so it's then seen as 'in-progress'.
I can see in the settings for this add-on, under the 'Properties' section there's an option to 'Preserve watched status' and I assume that will do what I'm wanting and leave the episode in the library database while also deleting the file — but it would probably remain only until the next time I 'clean' the library.
I'm not knocking the add-on at all, just explaining how it doesn't really work for me.
[EDIT]
While writing the above and considering what I currently do manually as the alternative — that is, to regularly manually delete all but the last episode of any such show I deem 'ephemeral' — I've come up with a possible solution to my own problem...
If I retain *
one* episode for each of those shows (just not the most recent one) then I could let After Watch delete newer episodes and then future episodes should still appear in the 'Next Episodes' widget because the library database will see it as newer than the one I have retained. They wouldn't even need to be real video files — just dummy text files named correctly and with a video-type extension. Not an elegant solution but good enough if it works, I'll test over the next week and provide an update.
