[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. :-(