[jbinkley60]

Just some thoughts about this new feature.. This is my first time in this thread and I have not read all 22 pages before posting this so I apologize if these points have already been raised...

1) How do you intend to handle cases where more than one label would apply? For example, if there's an extended version and an extended version with an alternate ending, or an extended director's cut? Or say a US theatrical release and non-US theatrical release(s)? In these examples just simply using "Extended" or "Theatrical" isn't accurate enough and won't properly cover the different versions. The same is true for remasters of special versions.

2) What about cases where there's a unique non-"standard" version like Mad Max: Fury Road (Black & Chrome edition), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Collectors Edition), movie's where there's an X year anniversary edition of different versions?

3) What kind of future-proofing is built into the design? Will users be able to add their own custom-defined version labels? Is the version value itself a string or a point to an array item?

I think video version support is a great feature to have, and it should be robust enough that it can handle anything no matter how obscure. What makes the most sense to me as an end-user is having the version field for each file be a string. You can select >= 1 from a pre-defined list. You should also be able to add your own custom versions to that list and/or have the ability to modify the string that gets stored. I think limiting or restricting the user's video version options would be an unnecessary and bad design flaw. I just hope the end result has been well-thought out and capable of satisfying all the users version labeling needs now and in the future.

Again, my apologies for voicing these concerns if they've already been resolved.

Thanks for your feedback.  I implemented similar functionality in the Mezzmo Kodi addon called movie collections.   I went through the same thoughts around specific tags for versions, multiple tags and such and decided, as you suggest, to allow the users to define their own tags.  I struggled with the same thought of whether I could predefine the tags / versions and decided against it for some of the reasons you highlight.  In my case users are typing from a keyboard into a GUI interface so having long tags isn't a big issue.  I wonder though when folks are using a Kodi screen keyboard how practical that may be.  For my approach I preceded the tag names with ###   which is known by the system to filter / sort on but not displayed to the users.  I do see where the predefined labels are a benefit if you have movie naming conformity and are trying to auto-assign the movie version to a predefined tag / label.  Maybe the most flexible approach for Kodi is both ?  Attempt to predefine the tag based upon name but then allow the user to override with a custom label ?

Do you think with allowing custom labels the issue of a movie belonging to multiple collections / versions would be an issue ?  I didn't think so.  For example in the approach I chose you could define a version called ###Avenger and then any movie with the ###Avenger tag would be displayed whether it is 3D, extended edition, theatrical, director's cut etc.  It would be whatever movies (even non-movies in the Mezzmo case) you choose to assign the label to.   With the customer label approach I have yet to see the need for a movie being part of multiple versions / collections.

Just my 2 cents,


Jeff