[Fuchs2468]

The only thing that can be added are zip files!

This is definitely unexpected, but I can choose any files in the dialog. Can you share a debug log?

Here is my log file:
https://paste.kodi.tv/jugufufebe.kodi

I hope it helps you.

[ashlar]

Coming back to this, after the initial discussion that led to the merge. Trying to configure correctly an existing library is a very slow process, but I'll get to it in the following points.

As usual, XODIDOX, thanks for this development. It was long needed and I appreciate your willingness and perseverance in creating it.

TLDR of the following: performance needs to be better, a single management dialog is needed, would be easier and clearer for all users. But read on... :-)


1) Convert Movie Version. I might be missing something but I don't understand the naming of this item. From what I can see, this is actually *creating* a movie version out of the selected movie. What is it supposed to be converting? But see the following points, because I think we could and should do without this entry.

2) Selecting "Manage Movie Version" on a movie that does not have versions leads to unexpected behavior from the following window, that I see has been already touched upon. The selected movie is represented as Standard Version and you have "Add version" on the right of the dialog window. But if you use that, you go to a file requester, where you can browse through your file structure. If that's considered useful for extras, fine, I sort of get that. But then it should be limited to Extras, not movie versions. Selecting "Add version" and not getting a list of movies in the library is really counterintuitive (at least for me, but I don't think it's just me, otherwise I wouldn't be pointing this out).

3) Performance. When using "Convert Movie Version", which actually "creates" a movie version out of the selected movie, I get ten seconds of Kodi "thinking", where everything is stuck. This on a Ryzen 5 3600. I dread how performance could be on an Amlogic or Pi machine (it might border on unusable for big libraries). And I'm talking about a machine that basically never makes me wait for anything, with database sitting on a fast NVME SSD drive. I remain optimistic about optimization being possible here. Kodi lists 3109 items for me in the "Convert into an additional version of movie" if that matters. And those ten seconds of waiting happen for each and every movie I decide to operate on. At a minimum (if possible, I don't know), the query that takes 10 seconds to produce results should be cached. Otherwise...say one has 300 movies to create versions for... it's 50 minutes of waiting. A bit excessive...

4) Linked to #1 and to the end of #3. The dialog states "Convert into an additional version of a movie", while it is instead creating the first version of a movie. And, as far as I can see, there is no other way to create the first version of a movie.
The problem is that when you select this you are actually not operating on the movie you have selected. Or you are but in a backward way.

Say I have two versions of movie ABC. One 1080p and one 4K.

If I select "Convert Movie Version" for movie ABC 4K, I get the dialog where I need to find movie ABC 1080p. This is where the "convert" naming makes sense, because what then happens is that you get asked to name movie ABC 4K as a version. Which is going to be a second version of movie ABC 1080p. So you operate on ABC 4K while in reality what you are doing is creating a second version for movie ABC 1080p. That is proven by the fact that the default version is set to ABC 1080p. So you select and operate on ABC 4K but pretty much everything happens on ABC 1080p. This is backwards.

5) Following on this, I think there should be a single Movie Version contextual menu item, as Movie Sets have. It should lead to the current Manage Movie Version dialog, where one should be able to do everything, operating in a logical and not backwards way (see #4). If there is need to have a file requester to operate at file system level (ie. not library), a different button should be added to this menu. But Add Version should basically function as "Convert Movie Version" does now, only in a straightforward way. Where if I operate on ABC 4K and I select Add Version, I get an additional version of ABC 4K, making it the default movie version and getting asked for a version name for the one I add.

Thanks for reading this long list. :-)

[ashlar]

One thing I forgot. When using "Show video with multiple versions as folder", one cannot select or access the "Information" window when "inside" the folder for any given movie versions set. This in contrast with what happens with regular Movie Sets, where you can access all info for all movies in a set.
You can get the Info window for the default movie in a Versions set, but not that for all other versions. If there is a way, I am not finding it. Don't know if it's intended behavior for some reason but it seems missing functionality to me.

Another thing: while browsing through a list to add versions, it would be *really* helpful to be able to use the usual "SMS shortcuts" to navigate the list. At first I thought they were not working but they actually are from the keyboard, but not from my remote. The shortcuts work from the remote in the regular list of movies, so I suppose my question is: where in keyboard.xml can I add them in order to have them work from the remote in the Movie Version dialogs? If there is a way to do it. If there isn't, it should be added.

[jjd-uk]

1) Convert Movie Version. I might be missing something but I don't understand the naming of this item. From what I can see, this is actually *creating* a movie version out of the selected movie. What is it supposed to be converting? But see the following points, because I think we could and should do without this entry.

It's converting it from a seperate library item to a version of an exisitng library item.

2) Selecting "Manage Movie Version" on a movie that does not have versions leads to unexpected behavior from the following window, that I see has been already touched upon. The selected movie is represented as Standard Version and you have "Add version" on the right of the dialog window. But if you use that, you go to a file requester, where you can browse through your file structure. If that's considered useful for extras, fine, I sort of get that. But then it should be limited to Extras, not movie versions. Selecting "Add version" and not getting a list of movies in the library is really counterintuitive (at least for me, but I don't think it's just me, otherwise I wouldn't be pointing this out).

The add version button is for adding another movie version, there is a separate add extras button for those.

I agree with you that the addition of movies versions needs to be better handled, this point has annoyed me also. For example I have theatrical version of Justice League 2017 and in addition I have Zack Snyder's Justice League 2021 so the Zack Synder version isn't detected as the same movie as theatrical version, that means I have to navigate through the file browser to the folder containing it to add it as a version. Perhaps there could be some shortcut like there is with artwork where there's an item folder entry, since in my case both versions are in the folder.

However I'm unsure if we should be presenting the full list of movies in the library as that could be quite long.

3) Performance. When using "Convert Movie Version", which actually "creates" a movie version out of the selected movie, I get ten seconds of Kodi "thinking", where everything is stuck. This on a Ryzen 5 3600. I dread how performance could be on an Amlogic or Pi machine (it might border on unusable for big libraries). And I'm talking about a machine that basically never makes me wait for anything, with database sitting on a fast NVME SSD drive. I remain optimistic about optimization being possible here. Kodi lists 3109 items for me in the "Convert into an additional version of movie" if that matters. And those ten seconds of waiting happen for each and every movie I decide to operate on. At a minimum (if possible, I don't know), the query that takes 10 seconds to produce results should be cached. Otherwise...say one has 300 movies to create versions for... it's 50 minutes of waiting. A bit excessive...

It was noticed that perfomance was degraded when you open the movie library views, so there is a PR open looking to address that. Not sure if that could also improve this.

4) Linked to #1 and to the end of #3. The dialog states "Convert into an additional version of a movie", while it is instead creating the first version of a movie. And, as far as I can see, there is no other way to create the first version of a movie.
The problem is that when you select this you are actually not operating on the movie you have selected. Or you are but in a backward way.

My understanding from my testing is as follows:

movie abc version 1.mkv - this gets automatically added to library
movie abc version 2.mkv - scan detects this as a new version so asks if you what to convert it to a new version of movie abc version 1

If you say no to the convert then you end up with duplicate library entries for movie abc one for each of version 1 and version 2.

If you say yes to the convert then you have a single libray entry for movie abc and you access the versions either via the dialog or directly from library if in display as folder mode.

[jjd-uk]

Note also that the look of this feature via Estuary is not fixed yet.

Following a lot of internal discussion the Estuary dialog is going to be updated again.

[rouz]

I am utilizing headless kodi to update my movie databases - Its not possible to use the "dialogue"-button in headless kodi.
Will I be able of utilizing and update Kodi with this feature?

[XODIDOX]

Here is my log file:
https://paste.kodi.tv/jugufufebe.kodi

I hope it helps you.

There is no related error in the log, no much useful information for investigation. Can you confirm there are other video files (a mkv file, for example) in the folder with these zip files? The dialog just filters out all non-video files based on file name extensions. I can't see why it works for me, but not for you. I also tested it on Windows where I use Mac as dev box.

[XODIDOX]

I am utilizing headless kodi to update my movie databases - Its not possible to use the "dialogue"-button in headless kodi.
Will I be able of utilizing and update Kodi with this feature?

You can use the option "Settings->Media->Library->Ignore different video versions on scan" to disable the version identification during scanning. It will work like the previous version of Kodi. Then you can use the context menu for movie to change version manually later.

[XODIDOX]

I agree with you that the addition of movies versions needs to be better handled, this point has annoyed me also. For example I have theatrical version of Justice League 2017 and in addition I have Zack Snyder's Justice League 2021 so the Zack Synder version isn't detected as the same movie as theatrical version, that means I have to navigate through the file browser to the folder containing it to add it as a version. Perhaps there could be some shortcut like there is with artwork where there's an item folder entry, since in my case both versions are in the folder.

Seems this is a good improvement; I'll see if I can add a shortcut for current item folder to the top of the list.

[rouz]

In wich XMLfile is it saved?
As I do not have a menu in headless-kodi
I guess guisettings.xml

[XODIDOX]

3) Performance. When using "Convert Movie Version", which actually "creates" a movie version out of the selected movie, I get ten seconds of Kodi "thinking", where everything is stuck. This on a Ryzen 5 3600. I dread how performance could be on an Amlogic or Pi machine (it might border on unusable for big libraries). And I'm talking about a machine that basically never makes me wait for anything, with database sitting on a fast NVME SSD drive. I remain optimistic about optimization being possible here. Kodi lists 3109 items for me in the "Convert into an additional version of movie" if that matters. And those ten seconds of waiting happen for each and every movie I decide to operate on. At a minimum (if possible, I don't know), the query that takes 10 seconds to produce results should be cached. Otherwise...say one has 300 movies to create versions for... it's 50 minutes of waiting. A bit excessive...

Are you using latest version? There was perf improvement for this. Also you can test it again after this PR 24226 (PR) merged.

[XODIDOX]

In wich XMLfile is it saved?
As I do not have a menu in headless-kodi
I guess guisettings.xml

Yes, it's in guisettings.xml, the setting id is "videolibrary.ignorevideoversions"

[jjd-uk]

I agree with you that the addition of movies versions needs to be better handled, this point has annoyed me also. For example I have theatrical version of Justice League 2017 and in addition I have Zack Snyder's Justice League 2021 so the Zack Synder version isn't detected as the same movie as theatrical version, that means I have to navigate through the file browser to the folder containing it to add it as a version. Perhaps there could be some shortcut like there is with artwork where there's an item folder entry, since in my case both versions are in the folder.

Seems this is a good improvement; I'll see if I can add a shortcut for current item folder to the top of the list.

Not sure how obvious it was, but just to confirm that as the filenaming is completely different I fully expected to have to add the Zack Syynder version manually, but anything to save having to do a full path browse would be good for this type of circumstance.

[jjd-uk]

Btw I've asked internally if someone can look at the Artwork PR. Unfortunately it touches on some areas where we don't have a lot of people active at the moment, hence the delay in getting confirmation that it's in a fit state to merge.

[maildeamon]

question ..
on my shield forced views does nothing ?? i dont get the menu to select a view  ?
on windows it works ?
is there a setup i must activate ?
mvg
Maildeamon