Feature requests for HT4.0

This option literally is in the picture I posted...

 

Ya, in my case, I shut off the dynamic overlay feature which made my movie selection page load much faster and cleaned up an overly-cluttered background on it.

 

For some reason on mine it doesn’t do that. It just brings up the list and I still need to navigate to the track I want.

It could be because I’m using a Harmony Hub and I mapped that command to my remote. Pressing the hotkey a 2nd time just closes the menu.

 

Hope this is related to trakt! That'd make it the perfect box for me!

 

Well now I'm intrigued!

 

Any news on this by chance?

 

Soon I hope...

 

Awesome, thank you for everything you do!

 

I posted this in the Development sub-forum the other day, but this thread seems to be a lot more active. I've skimmed through the most recent pages & I can see that some of what I'm suggesting has already been requested:

• The ability to mark individual episodes as watched/unwatched would be a great addition.
• I would love to see a pop-up menu option to play random episodes from a TV series or season folder.
• Posterwall - coloured banner behind the IMDB rating & the watched icon (like the resolution banner), or perhaps give the text a black border? It's nearly impossible to see either of these if the poster has a white background.
• When selecting a video to view the details, I've noticed that the default audio track is not necessarily always listed first. For example, I have a video that's default audio is multichannel FLAC, with a secondary AC3 commentary track. Only the AC3 track shows up in the media info. It would also be great if the audio track channels were displayed (2.0, 5.1, 7.1).
• I'd like to see all 'In Progress' movies & TV series permanently on the home screen. I've got quite a few TV series & movies in progress & if I don't get back to them within a certain time, they disappear from the home screen.
  
• One last thing (for now), & I think it's important: the ability to change the Posterwall refresh frequency during media scanning. 5 seconds is too frequent. If I'm casually scrolling through my large media library during a scan, It's quite frustrating when the Posterwall refreshes & I end up back at the top of whatever directory I'm in! Being able to set adjustable refresh times from 5-30 (or even 60) seconds would be awesome.

 

An option to refresh metadata would be nice. Way too often I find episodes that are somehow getting pulled from TMDB with generic information..no episode name just episode number and a generic description of the TV show itself and not the episode. This happens even if you have NFO files setup in HT.

Only way to fix it is to re-match the file and use a different database (so switch to TVDB if you used TMDB before or visa versa). No idea why this happens.

 

Here are a few wishes as well:

1. An adjustable automatic update (at every start or temporally e.g. every 3 days or so) of the sources as with Kodi would be very good. Currently, you always have to do it manually.

2. An activatable caching of the covers on the device would be great, so that the covers can be loaded faster. In my case, all covers are on the NAS which is connected via WLAN 5g locally and it always takes a long time when scrolling until the covers are reloaded.

3. The possibility of intelligent playlist would be very good. I would like to create my own category in which only the movie collections from a certain folder on the hard drive can be displayed. At the moment you can only display all movie collections in the predefined category Collections, regardless of which folder they are located in. But I would like to have a filter possibility for it, so that I have at the end a category Collections (children) and a category Collections (adults).

4. It would be great if there would be a possibility, if a cover is missing somewhere, to download it from the scraper alone (either automatically or manually with a keystroke), even if the actual information about the movie comes from a local source. For example, I have the problem that every now and then I miss a picture from a collection. So at the moment I have to turn on TinyMediaManger on the PC and use it to search for the image on the internet and copy it manually to the NAS. But if there would be the possibility to search directly in HT by means of the built-in scraper for this one image, then that would be wonderful.

5. Local trailers in a full HD resolution are not played completely in the current version. The trailer just starts and then stops after about 10s. If you reduce the resolution of the same trailer to max. 720 x 576 then the trailer will play completely.

6. The automatic retrieval and playback of trailers from the Internet does not work properly. That's why I made the effort with the local trailers (see point 5).

 

I already wrote a feature request for HT4, but I wanted to clarify with pictures what I meant for Zidoo developers, and why I absolutely hate HT4. Sorry if somes pictures are a little blurry.



I have a big collection of files/movies on my NAS, because of this I have to use the "File"option in the settings instead of the "Poster" view in HT4 (what an unorganized mess it is when you use the "Poster" view)


So here in this example, I created folders with all the Aliens movies, Alfred Hitchcock, Agatha Christie.... movies in each folder. Also as you can see on the right upper corner I am on 1/1995 files/folders so if I want to go to the file 1995, I have to scroll down one by one to go to the item 1995, what a waste of time why can't we go directly from 1 to 1995 by pushing the upper arrow (no you can't), why can't we scroll down by page instead of one item at a time? Also, why do we have this only type of "List View" It'd be great if we could change the type of view here (like Kodi/ZDMC)



Here in this example I created a folder named "Alien Anthology" and inside I put all the Alien, Prometheus, and some documentaries, but once again why this ONLY type of view, BORING, why we don't have more viewing display here?


Here in this example,I created a main folder "Mangas" and inside I put some sub-folders such as "Dragon Ball Universe"


In that sub folder "Dragon Ball Universe" I created some sub, sub-folders with Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball Super...., and in each folder all the episodes of Dragon Ball Z (291 episodes), Dragon Ball (163 episodes)....


So here again the same boring view, if you want to go to episode 291 you have to scroll down through all the pages, you can't use the up arrow to go from 1 to 291 directly. and the scrolling is so slow compared to Kodi/Zidoo. If I use the Poster View" in the main settings try to find the episode Dragon Ball Z #78 for example, good luck with that. The episodes are all over the place, unorganized. With the "File" option I can find them faster, BUT once again only one view to display the posters, slow scrolling, impossible to scroll down page by page, and impossible to use the up arrow to go from item 1 to item 291 for example. Unless there's a setting somewhere to change the view of the posters when you use the :"File" option, but so far I can't find it. With Kodi/ZDMC, it's fast to scroll down the pages, you have different views you can display posters, with HT4, NO YOU CAN'T, sorry NO SALE for me for HT4


Zidoo developers, how about adding this type of view "Thumbnails" or any other views instead of the boring and depressing "List view" you have in the "File"option in the setting. I'm not asking to have HT4 like Kodi/ZDMC, I'm just asking for some so much needed improvements in the display setting, faster scrolling and better usability.

 

The option to rewind a few seconds automatically after a pause would be great too. I find myself doing that anyways almost every time I restart playback.

 

Here is another feedback from me on the current firmware and in particular HomeTheater 4.0.
Just a few points that I noticed negatively, because I've been working on it intensively for the last few days. All points listed below apply under the proviso that I scrape all films or series locally. That means I scraped all films or series in advance with the TinyMediaManger software and created a clean structure. All relevant information is available locally in the form of images and nfo files. To rule out errors, I manually compared the structures with the given structures in TMDB, IMDB and TVDB. But now we come to the problems:

1. Sources
If you scan a source, you currently only have the option of saying whether you want to scrape it online or locally (nfo parse = priority). That's very good! What is less good is the fact that there are no filter options in the sources. It happened that HT, for whatever reason, did not correctly recognize a film using the local nfo file. Currently there is no way to only display the folders in the sources that HT has not recognized correctly. You can see from the total number that something has not been recognized, but you cannot display the relevant folders or files directly or access them in a targeted manner. I know that there is a category "unassigned" but only "unassigned" individual film files are displayed in this category, but not the entire folder structure itself. This point does not provide any information about which folders in the sources were not correctly recognized or where HT had or has problems recognizing them.

2. Source update
HT has the possibility of an automatic source update. Very well! However, in my opinion, this is not yet 100% mature. I often have the case that I have replaced an HD film in a source with a UHD film of the same name. However, sometimes HT often doesn't get the change, so it doesn't update the source properly. It has also happened that he updates the source but does not update the relevant film in the overview in HT. This means that HT still displays an HD movie even though it is a UHD movie. I suspect the automatic update algorithm is by name or something like that. My suggestion would be to create a second database with checksums for each read file and the entire source itself when creating the film database at the same time and then use this for the comparison. This would ensure that HT also notices changes in the individual files where the name has remained the same.

3. Sources update with custom categories
If HT automatically updates a source, then this update will not be propagated to the associated custom categories. My current structure is that I have a film source for our children and a film source for us adults. The individual film folders with the respective films are located in the respective sources. After reading the entire source, I currently assign all folders to a custom category using batch processing, for example the custom category Movies (children). If a source is now updated (e.g. a film is added), the linked custom category is not updated as well. My suggestion would be to include a possibility in the sources with which an entire source can be assigned to one or more categories and thus to implement a link with the automatic update of the source. The goal is to automatically update the category with an automatic update of the source.

4. Recognize unassigned movies or series
With the point "no assignment" or "reassign films" there is currently no way to reassign a film or series using a local nfo file. You only have the option of having the film recognized online using TMDB, TVDB or TVMAZE. It would only be logical if you could also access the local resources.

5. Custom categories
The custom categories do not work properly. I noticed the example of the film collections. If you take the pre-made standard category "MOVIES" all collections (apart from the problem in point 6) are displayed correctly. However, if you use a custom category and assign the same films to it as in the standard "MOVIES" category, the collections are no longer displayed correctly. This means that some collections are displayed correctly, but other collections are displayed broken down. This means that the individual films are no longer combined, but are available individually. However, if you go to the menu of these films, you will see that this film belongs to a collection. It works if you manually dissolve the collections of the films in question in the menu and combine them into a new collection with a new name. However, if you try the same operation with the corresponding collection from the list (I suspect that this comes from the nfo file or an internet source) it does not work in the custom category. The films are not combined into one collection. As already mentioned, this phenomenon only occurs with custom categories. Everything is fine in the standard categories such as "MOVIES", "SERIES" or "COLLECTIONS".

6. Movie Collections
HT groups films into collections when specified in the nfo file. In my case, I scrape the films with TinyMediaManger, so that the film collection is always stored correctly in the nfo file. I've checked this by hand on various films and checked against TMDB or another source. However, HT does not always read this information correctly. Means, using the example of the "Ice Age" film collection, that HT creates 2 film collections with the name "Ice Age Film Collection" instead of merging all Ice Age films into one film collection. You can correct this manually by dissolving one of the two collections and assigning it to the second, but that's not how it should be! I took a close look at the nfo files of the films in question and they are completely identical in terms of the name of the film collection. Despite everything, when reassigning the individual films to a collection, the "Ice Age Film Series" film series appears twice in the list of available collections. It is spelled exactly the same, but has the color yellow with a slightly narrower icon in front and a second time the color green with a slightly wider icon in front. To me it looks as if HT is using 2 different sources to combine the films for the collections and is getting confused. Or rather, HT does not only use the local information as advertised, but accesses any internet source and assigns the films to the collections using these 2 different references. The fact that when the sources are read in again, the result can be different (it can be that the film collection in question was summarized correctly, but another one was wrong) speaks for an attribution error. But what is strange again is the fact that it can happen that if you want to dissolve one of the collections of the films in question, both collections will dissolve, since they have the same name. Unfortunately, a restart does not solve the problem mentioned! It should also be noted at this point that the problem with the film collections described only relates to the standard categories "Movies", "Series" and "Collections". In the custom categories, see point 5, it is much worse...

PS: Sorry for the bad english...

 

About the source update (2), you still have the « more » button on the details page to refresh the technical informations in the window appearing on screen. That works well.

 

HI Mark,
I really Support the opinion, that the Library should always be present.
There are several reasons:

• It’s just a much better feel, if you have the same view to your content all the time.
• Sometimes, you just would like to browse through your library and get an inspiration, what you would like to watch.
• If you are having many sources, Not all of them maybe running, in order to save energy.
• Sometimes, you just don’t know if you have a movie already or Not.
• And finally, the posterwall looks soooo great, especially, when there are many posters. And I would like to see them all the time

So, if it would be possible, please give us the toy as an option.
Thanxxxxxx

 

Meeee Toooo

 

Could it be because the tmdb site is multilingual, and the tvdb and tvmaze sites are only available in english.

 

I would love to have the ability to only scan media that has changed instead of doing a FULL library scan every time HT detects a file has changed. Its kind of ridiculous and takes too much time. Plex and Kodi are capable of updating the library like this. Please implement it in HT.

 

I was thinking this the other day as well. Would be a great feature to have!