VirtualTV plugin

[pünktchen 1258]

8 hours ago, MischievousMet said:

Just a quick question, but what are the options Single Playback and Continuous Playblack (both Archive and Live)?

Archive always plays from the start, while Live begins with the current time offset.

[PuffyToesToo 280]

One thing I did want to make mention of (and existed in the previous version), is that when manually changing the channel graphic, it deletes the original image from the hard drive. Not a big issue, but I thought it would be good info to have.

[MischievousMet 0]

I'm in the process of making a channel for animated movies from Disney. When I put Animation in "genre": and run it, I get all animated movies like I would expect. When I place all of the Disney studios in "studios" I get all of the Disney movies from all of the studios I put in just as I would expect. However, when I place them both in, it only creates a channel with the studio filter and ignores the genre filter.

[pünktchen 1258]

57 minutes ago, MischievousMet said:

I'm in the process of making a channel for animated movies from Disney. When I put Animation in "genre": and run it, I get all animated movies like I would expect. When I place all of the Disney studios in "studios" I get all of the Disney movies from all of the studios I put in just as I would expect. However, when I place them both in, it only creates a channel with the studio filter and ignores the genre filter.

Nice finding!

[pünktchen 1258]

New version 0.8.6 in the starting post:

• Fixed Studio movie channel condition in conjunction with other filters

[MischievousMet 0]

1 hour ago, pünktchen said:

New version 0.8.6 in the starting post:

• Fixed Studio movie channel condition in conjunction with other filters

Awesome work, man. Keep it up!

[pmac 132]

On 9/8/2020 at 6:47 PM, pünktchen said:

New version 0.8.6 in the starting post:

• Fixed Studio movie channel condition in conjunction with other filters

I'm having a similar issue; I'm trying to create a channel for my son that uses both a tag "kids", and two genres, "family" and "animation". I'm finding that it ignores the genres and only shows titles that I've tagged "kids"

[AboveUnrefined 7]

I've been having nothing but problems when trying to use this with my roku tv and an Amazon tv stick:

1. Usually, I can only get through one episode of any particular stream before hitting an indefinite "Loading..." screen while on roku or getting a completely garbled screen on Amazon tv stick. Either way I have to hit back and restart the stream to get things going again. What's further frustrating is while I'm on the roku tv, I'll get some sessions that might last several episodes before getting hit with the "Loading" screen. 90% of the time it seems I'll just encounter that loading problem, and it doesn't seem to matter how I set up the channel type to do continuous live or from the beginning.

2. When not using continuous streaming and setting things to be "live" the roku will just show a frame of the show and then quit out of the stream. If it's not continuous and set to start from the beginning of an episode, the episode will play through but then at the end it will quit playing.

3. I noticed with recent updates none of the shorts I've had for my son's channel don't come through when they previously did and that there's a lot less variety going on. I'm not really sure what's going on there since I am just using tags for now...

4. Sometimes in the afternoon, I'll see that just one episode of one thing shows up on the epg - an episode of something that might only be 5 minutes is just on for the rest of the day. It doesn't coincide with the guide sync time either.

My time is pretty limited but I figure to at least provide some feedback as to what's been going on when I do try to use this.

[pünktchen 1258]

1 hour ago, pmac said:

I'm having a similar issue; I'm trying to create a channel for my son that uses both a tag "kids", and two genres, "family" and "animation". I'm finding that it ignores the genres and only shows titles that I've tagged "kids"

I cannot reproduce your problem here. Please post a screenshot of your channel conditions (from "Release Date ..." downwards).

[pünktchen 1258]

1 hour ago, AboveUnrefined said:

My time is pretty limited but I figure to at least provide some feedback as to what's been going on when I do try to use this.

Thanks for your feedback.

1 hour ago, AboveUnrefined said:

I1. Usually, I can only get through one episode of any particular stream before hitting an indefinite "Loading..." screen while on roku or getting a completely garbled screen on Amazon tv stick. Either way I have to hit back and restart the stream to get things going again. What's further frustrating is while I'm on the roku tv, I'll get some sessions that might last several episodes before getting hit with the "Loading" screen. 90% of the time it seems I'll just encounter that loading problem, and it doesn't seem to matter how I set up the channel type to do continuous live or from the beginning.

2. When not using continuous streaming and setting things to be "live" the roku will just show a frame of the show and then quit out of the stream. If it's not continuous and set to start from the beginning of an episode, the episode will play through but then at the end it will quit playing.

Unfortunately i don't own any of your devices to test streaming. But from the very, very few comments here about about using the plugin with a Roku, it seems the Roku player is just to limited to make it a good choice for everything other than real online streaming services. It could also be just the revision/generation of the Roku device. I don't know.

1 hour ago, AboveUnrefined said:

3. I noticed with recent updates none of the shorts I've had for my son's channel don't come through when they previously did and that there's a lot less variety going on. I'm not really sure what's going on there since I am just using tags for now...

Since what version do you think this happens?

1 hour ago, AboveUnrefined said:

4. Sometimes in the afternoon, I'll see that just one episode of one thing shows up on the epg - an episode of something that might only be 5 minutes is just on for the rest of the day. It doesn't coincide with the guide sync time either.

Never ever seen this here.

 

[AboveUnrefined 7]

14 minutes ago, pünktchen said:

Since what version do you think this happens?

I just started seeing this happen with the newer release, I think the variety of series coming through on 0.8.4 was a little better but I'd see the same episodes of each series come through a lot. This later update seems to be clustering a lot of the same series together and I'm seeing limited amount of series coming through...

I might be having to give up with using the roku for this, I just really don't want to have another remote to deal with and have to spend more money on crap. But I can see what you might be dealing with on the roku side of things with more rules for how things work. I'd probably just focus on getting everything straight with whatever works with most people first and then get the other wrinkles ironed out. If you can get something that works really well on any of the devices I'd probably pay some money for that, right now as it is though I can't really use this since it's not working so hot with my set up. I'll keep an eye on any updates and try it out as it gets more mature.

[hstamas 153]

@pünktchen this might have been asked before, even by me but I can recall or find a previous post.

The old Psudo TV on Kodi used to be able to start playback of a show that appears in the guide at a future time/date.

Would that be possible here?

Lots of times a show thats currently playing is not what I want to watch and would like to select a show that further down the timeline.

 

[pünktchen 1258]

Not possible with Emby.

[PuffyToesToo 280]

I would like to ask if there is a way to set the number of intros to play? So instead of it automatically playing 3, I'd like to set that to possibly 1 or 2? Additionally, be able to specify how many items play before an intro/bumper gets played. For example, for music videos, it would be nice to be able to have (for example) 5 videos play before a bumper.  Thanks.

Edited September 11, 2020 by PuffyToesToo

[pünktchen 1258]

You have set bumpers for music videos? Why would anybody want that? Anyway, although your request is possible, i will not do that in the near future. No time for that currently. Sorry!

Edited September 11, 2020 by pünktchen

[PuffyToesToo 280]

1 hour ago, pünktchen said:

You have set bumpers for music videos? Why would anybody want that? Anyway, although your request is possible, i will not do that in the near future. No time for that currently. Sorry!

I appreciate the reply, thank you!

[pmac 132]

On 9/10/2020 at 8:09 PM, pünktchen said:

I cannot reproduce your problem here. Please post a screenshot of your channel conditions (from "Release Date ..." downwards).

I actually figured out that issue, and it was on my end. In doing so, I've come across a new problem though, and in my case it's a particularly bad problem...

The kids channel I've created is just set up to add using "family" and "animation" genres; for some reason it seems to be adding titles with "family" in the title though, and ended up adding "F is for Family" and "Family Guy" to the "Kids Channel" I created, which is obviously not ideal, especially the first show being absolutely terrible for children to watch, lol. I double checked that it wasn't adding them based on genre, and made sure to remove the "animation" genre from both those shows, and they still show up in the guide even after a refresh.

[pünktchen 1258]

1 hour ago, pmac said:

I actually figured out that issue, and it was on my end. In doing so, I've come across a new problem though, and in my case it's a particularly bad problem...

The kids channel I've created is just set up to add using "family" and "animation" genres; for some reason it seems to be adding titles with "family" in the title though, and ended up adding "F is for Family" and "Family Guy" to the "Kids Channel" I created, which is obviously not ideal, especially the first show being absolutely terrible for children to watch, lol. I double checked that it wasn't adding them based on genre, and made sure to remove the "animation" genre from both those shows, and they still show up in the guide even after a refresh.

I can assure you the show title is not considered in any condition. One reason for your results could be that i'm not only checking the series for genres but also the episodes. So you should really verify this.

[Popeye2468 31]

ok first love this plugin

 

second does it have the ability to say play episodes from the tv series that i set?

 

for instance if i want a channel that has spongebob, fineas and ferb, henry danger and power rangers episodes only can i achieve this?

 

Thanks

[Inx192 0]

Once again, this plugin just gets better.

I am still tweaking my channels but a couple of things I have noticed that are a problem to me.

1. Most TV channels created are listing two random episodes from the same show one after the other in the EPG before it changes show.

2. It seems like everyday a couple of the shows play the same episode. There is no reason for this as I have a large enough collection of each genre to not repeats on a daily basis or even weekly.

Each channel is only setup by genre and all set to continuous playback (live).

Edited September 12, 2020 by Inx192

[pünktchen 1258]

6 hours ago, Popeye2468 said:

ok first love this plugin

 

second does it have the ability to say play episodes from the tv series that i set?

 

for instance if i want a channel that has spongebob, fineas and ferb, henry danger and power rangers episodes only can i achieve this?

 

Thanks

Just create "Tags" for those shows.

[pünktchen 1258]

@Inx192 First goes into the same direction as @PuffyToesToo question. Currently it's hardcoded to take between one and three episodes of a show at random to generate the list. Some day i will make this configurable, but not in the next time.

Second is just the way a randomizer works. Imagine you have list A,B,C,D,F,G. After the first iteration you get something like F,B,A,G,D,C and maybe after the second iteration something like D,B,F,C,G,A. You see that B is in the same spot, in the original list and after shuffling. Although that's not something we would expect, the list itself is random. If i would find a solution to this, i would get the Nobel Price for math.

[akacharos 11]

Just a suggestion for future development: Add Playlists or Collections in "Include Library Folders". That will immediately give us the option to populate the queue with targeted content (eg. create a playlist with your favorite 100 movies, so the epg is generated from this pool).

Amazing job on the VirtualTV btw! Thanks for all the efforts

[pmac 132]

On 9/11/2020 at 10:23 PM, pünktchen said:

I can assure you the show title is not considered in any condition. One reason for your results could be that i'm not only checking the series for genres but also the episodes. So you should really verify this.

Hmm, alright. I've checked a few episodes and the "family" genre wasn't in any of the ones I checked, but maybe it's in there somewhere.

As a workaround I ended up adding an "exclude" tag to those shows and put "!exclude" in the tags section for that channel, which seems to be working fine.

Another question I have is regarding episode order for TV shows. I read somewhere else in this thread that episodes should play in chronological order, but mine seem to be playing randomly. On one channel I have two episodes of Friends scheduled to play back to back, but it goes from S4E8 and then right to S9E9. None of the episodes are marked as watched yet, since I created a new user just for VirtualTV in order to not mess up the watched states of my regular users, so basically everything should still be marked as unwatched, yet the episode order seems completely random.

Is this expected behavior? or should my episodes be playing in order (while also being interleaved with movies and other shows)?

All of my channels are set to Continuous Playback (Live), Mixed Content, Random (Interleaved)

[pmac 132]

On 9/11/2020 at 9:24 AM, hstamas said:

@pünktchen this might have been asked before, even by me but I can recall or find a previous post.

The old Psudo TV on Kodi used to be able to start playback of a show that appears in the guide at a future time/date.

Would that be possible here?

Lots of times a show thats currently playing is not what I want to watch and would like to select a show that further down the timeline.

 

Wouldn't it make more sense to just play that show from your normal library view?