[jjd-uk]

All I'll say is that we hoped to work with xodidox to improve this feature, but it seems it wasn't to be. Anyway rest assured we are doing our best to make sure this feature is in fit shape for the Omega v21 release.

[HNYTC]

Merry Christmas to all.

I have many external drives connected to my PC and all my movies are duplicated among these devices to ensure a backup in case one fails me. The drives are not mirrored backed up, in other words, one movie can be backed up in drive f, the other in derive G. So this feature, was something I was looking for, so I dont need to manually remove the duplicate from library. Not to mention most of my movies are in both format 1080p and 2160p. So I end up, most of the times, with 4 same movies showing in the library. 

I really appreciated the effort and time xodidox put to develop this feature, and wish that his work will be included in the omega version, or something similar to that. It will be an essential feature, and no-brainer, that when scanning to be prompted that there is a duplicate of the same movie, and be able to include or not include in the final list. I believe many are looking fo this featurer.

Please KODI team, do your best to manage this addition, in the upcoming release. Your program is amazing for movie lovers, but really misses this feature.

Happy New Year to all too

[Hitcher]

Please KODI team, do your best to manage this addition, in the upcoming release.

Don't worry, we are:

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pulls?q=is%...FExtras%22

[jjd-uk]

This should tell the amount of work the Team has also been putting in to get this feature ready for the Omega release https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pulls?q=is%...FExtras%22

[HNYTC]

Thank you and thanks for your team, but also can't help not to thank xodidox for the intial effort and time he invested. Hope all this end up in an amicable way as I truly believe that all parties want the same objectives.

Happy New Year.

[scott967]

Hate to be a Debbie Downer, but the UI for this has me baffled.  This is using the 1227 nightly default settings.

I add a movie source and scan with local info only  (seemed to take a long time but I need to do a side-by-side to make sure).
So I have 3 movies with the same title.  Seem like candidates for versioning.  Now, how to do that?

I can open the info dialog for each one.  I see a "versions" button.  OK sounds good.  When I click that, I see a list with just "standard version".  OK.  Logically I use the "rename" button to select the version.  OK.  So I repeat with the other 2 titles.  Now all three are "named" versions, but the only way I know that is to open the info dialog and click "versions".  Back in the main movie/titles view I still have 3 movies with identical titles.

OK so what now??
I try the context menu.  I see 2 options.  "Convert to version" and "Manage versions"  wtf?  So I try "manage versions" (seems like that is what I want to do, manage my versions) , takes me back to same place as info dialog-versions button.  No go.  So back to context menu, try "convert to version".  So I get a dialog that is titled: "Convert into an additional version".  What does this mean??  The currently selected movie (where I opened the context menu) will be converted into a version of the movie I select in this dialog, or the movie in the dialog will be converted into a version of the selected movie?

I suppose after playing around with it a user can figure out what the intent is, but there seems like a real learning curve.

Note that I got here because I wanted to start fresh and I am more worried about the video playlist, but can't even start there until I get versions setup.

scott s.
.

[jjd-uk]

It's not clear to me exactly you are doing, so I'm going with my best guess from what you've written.

First assumption, you have severval different versions of a movie already scanned into the library? so you have the 3 duplicate entries in Titles view?

If you you wish all 3 to be associated with only the 1 entry in Titles view, then this is where you use the Covert option.

Let's say you have:

Movie version A
Movies version B
Movie version C

You want Movie version A as you your default.

Go to Context menu of Movie version B and select the Covert option and from the list select Movie version A and then you'll be asked for the version type, then once done Movie version B is removed from the Titles view and you should now see 2 versions when selecting Movie Version A. So this Covert option is used on movies that you wish to be converted from an independent library item to into a version of another movie, and this will result in the selected movie on which you opened the Conect menu being removed from Titles.

Repeat for Movie version C

Once done you'll only be left with Movie version A in Titles with Movies version B and Movie version C as additional versions.

[jjd-uk]

I thought Add version in the Manage dialog should also trigger a similar conversion process, however that doesn't seem to be the case, so I'll need to check if that's something that has changed with all the refactoring work being done the the versions code.

[ashlar]

Hate to be a Debbie Downer, but the UI for this has me baffled.

I touched upon this in the past. I quote myself from here:

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.

I still think I was right in my proposal. Movie Versions do not need more than one contextual menu entry.

Edit: I see @ksoo is proceeding with the two entries, while renaming entries. I might miss something that makes the two entries needed, I really don't know what but I'd like for somebody to enlighten me (and I'm not ironic, I'm genuinely curious).

I wrote here: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24356 but I see the issue is already closed. Don't even know if anybody would read what I wrote. I tried contributing to this, but after xodidox went away... it seems all discussion moved to somewhere behind the scenes, ignoring what had been said here. :-(

[da-anda]

I think we in general agree that the UI/usability needs improvements, so no objections from our side to get rid of it in general. It's mostly a question of how much we can fix/improve/refactor without dragging the release out even further. So the aim for now is to fix what is currently in and revamp for P*. It was a long discussion of whether we wanted to get this feature into Omega (especially this late) and honor the hard work xodidox had already put into the PR (also taking his past attempts into account), or if we better hold it back for P* and potentially risk that xodidox will be disappointed and abandon/close the PR and never come back. We decided to take the risk and encourage a potential long term contributor as you can see, along with all the implications that might come along.

So your feedback is more than welcome, but we will not be able to fix everything for Omega

[ksooo]

I also encourage everybody interested to test a recent nightly build. Lots of stuff has changed/got fixed since beta 2.

[ksooo]

Link to the nightly builds: http://mirrors.kodi.tv/nightlies/

[ashlar]

Link to the nightly builds: http://mirrors.kodi.tv/nightlies/

Performance when converting to a version is now fast as expected. Great!

When browsing versions as a folder, selecting the contextual menu and then Manage leads to a window where there is one empty spot in the list.
The list has the following entries

Rename
BLANK SPOT (not literally, it's simply blank, empty)
Remove
Choose art

Also, we remain with artwork for the "main" version being empty when it was correctly populated when versions where kept as separate, different movies.

I convert a 4K HDR movie to a new "4K" version of the same movie in 1080. When I browse the versions as a folder, the 1080 version (defaults as "Standard", fine for my usage) does not have any artwork. If I choose the option "Choose art" I can select art for it but it was populated before becoming a version, it should remain populated without manual intervention. On large collections it becomes an incredible time waste.

Still think this would be more intuitive if there was only "Manage Versions" in the contextual menu but I can understand if it's too late for this kind of change for Omega. I think this is what da-anda meant.

Edit: I asked before, I'll ask again. Where do I have to edit keymap.xml in order to have SMS shortcuts working with a remote when browsing for versions? SHIFT+letter works, it doesn't work from the remote (and my keymap.xml has it working in movies and tv shows lists).

[CrystalP]

There is code to convert the art at the same time as the movie, something must have gone wrong.
I'm not sure I understood correctly the situation.
1080p and 4k movies had full artwork, you converted the 4k into a version of 1080p and now the 1080p doesn't have artwork anymore? In info screen, when browsing the movie as a folder, in the manage versions dialog?
An issue in github may be in order.

[ksooo]

@ashlar and others I suggest to follow our activities on GitHub, both the open issues and the PRs flagged with the label „Feature: Video Versions/Extras“ give you the best overview what is already known issues and what already is worked on. If you know about issues not logged there, please open a new issue. So we can best keep track.