#2 New series and Old series clash

[John McDonald]

When a user decides to track both a new series (eg. Battlestar Galactica 2003) and an older series of the same name (eg. Battlestar Galactica 1978), Viewport can confuse poorly named files as being from the wrong series without asking. Here is a transcript of an email conversation I had with a friend about it:

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You brought up a good bug in ViewPort. And the root of the bug is that if you are tracking both an old version of a show, and a new version of a show (Dr. Who in your case, but there are many other examples including BSG), then when you have an episode that is named just "Dr. Who" and it doesn't specify whether it's old or new, my program just starts assuming.

Any thoughts on how you'd like ViewPort to handle your situation? One thought I had was to recognize when a new file could be part of two Tracked Series, it would come up with a dialog and ask you which series it belongs to (where tracked series are ones that you have in your personal list. This method could get annoying, looking at your file names, are there any assumptions I can make? For example, do you have them in different folders? Do all of the old ones have strictly "Dr. Who" (or variants) with no dates attached, and the new ones only sometimes have a date attached?

John

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Yeah it is a complicated scenario. Unlike BSG, it's not a reboot, but a continuation of the original series and it isn't always distinguished.
The original series is almost always referred to as "Doctor Who", but the new series may be "Doctor Who (2005)" or just "Doctor Who". Also I don't separate the old and new series into different folders (it's not a very useful distinction because the original series still spans 26 years of programming) but rather split it up based on the actor playing the Doctor. This is an unusual way to sort a series, but is really the most sensible way this particular series.

If it is necessary to split it into two entries, it would probably need to ask for every file/batch to get it correct. There are lot of episodes, so some sort of summarized list rather than a dialog for each episode would be nice.

To further complicate matters there is another numbering scheme used for this series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Doctor_Who_serials which is sometimes used.

Anyway, sorry to complicate things, hope this information helps (it really is a complicated case that doesn't apply to most TV series)

Jonatron

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:) No that's useful. So.. you have folders for each of the actors that played Dr. Who, that makes sense. So inside each folder are a bunch of files that all relate to the same series? But there are a number of folders. What I'm thinking of doing to handle this scenarios, and others like it is:

If an episode can be part of more than one series, and two or more of those series are being tracked, then ask the user which of the possible series this episode belongs to. If however, there is only one tracked show, just add it to the tracked show. I'm also going to need to add a method of re-scanning episodes so that the user can be like "No, that doesn't belong here".

So... one thing to note is that if Dr. Who (2005) was added first, all of the old Dr. Who episodes would be sorted as 2005. IF Dr. Who (orig) was added first, then if a properly named episode of 2005 were scanned, it would create a Second Series, and then the questions would start cropping up.

And in the case where 2005 was added first and all the orig were added incorrectly to that series, The user would need to manually Add the original series, then ask ViewPort to re-scan the episodes of Dr. Who 2005, where it will then give the user a bunch of questions

A little messy, and this method will have to be documented in the FAQ and elsewhere, but this should only crop up IF a user is watching 2 versions of the same show.

To help you (and others) out, I'd think of somehow being able to tell ViewPort that everything in -this- directory belongs to the same series.

The reason I'm mentioning this method is not because it's the best solution, but simply because a solution that can get the job done, and won't require yet an other scan() make-over. A few people have mentioned that they'd like to be able to see all the files that ViewPort is confused about in one big list and then deal with them all there. Right now (as you may have gathered), ViewPort's Scan is very linear. It deals with files as it comes across them. Changing that to a Scan everything then deal with it later method could be a little tricky.

John

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