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[glynor]

I don't have that many, but I do have a few Movie Extras and TV Show extras that I've ripped off of disc or recorded or whatever.  You know, the episode 0 things and the extras on the BluRay?  I was originally thinking that it might be useful to have a Media Sub Type for them (and it would), but maybe...

Maybe it would be nice to be able to handle them as Stacks somehow.  What if you could stack a Movie with any of its extra content, and then when you play the file back, you could switch to the "bonus content" via the OSD much like you do with switching a stream.   A way to "open into" the different stacked files in Theater View would also be slick (it would have to be enabled on a View-by-View basis, because you wouldn't want to do this with Audio or Photos in most cases).

Handling TV Show "extras episodes" might not be so easy, and it might still be better in practice to just continue handling them as episode 0 or something similar.  But, maybe you stack the special episodes with the first episode in each season, or some episode near where it aired originally (if it did)?  Either way, for Movies it could be VERY slick.

[glynor]

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that this would be the perfect way to handle that kind of extra content, without having to resort to ISO rips.

[rick.ca]

You can [stack videos], but there's one rather obvious use-case it won't handle—stacking multi-part movies (e.g., a movie broken into two or more files). Such files can be stacked in Standard View and there is a Play stack function, but that doesn't carry-over into Theatre View. If they're stacked, only the top appears—as expected—but then there's no way to play subsequent parts.

There's lot's of use-cases for stacking videos. I don't think there's any compelling need for special treatment of stacked videos in Theatre View. All that's needed is for the Play stack function that already exists in Standard View to have an equivalent in Theatre View. We probably don't even need that. It would be sufficient if Play would simple play all the members of a stack. It would then be possible to stack something before or after a movie (for example), and then just skip it if not interested. Users can decide for themselves whether such an item should be stacked, or kept separate so it can be selected alone or so information about it can be recorded. If one did adopt a practice of stacking "extras," however, it might make sense to maintain and display a custom memo field where information about those extras is recorded.

Here's another use-case: I've collected trailers for most of my movies. In Personal Video Database, they're simply recorded in the same path field of a movie record as the movie. If I were to use PVD's play command, it would play the trailer followed by the movie. I would have been perfectly happy to do the same thing in MC—by stacking them. Yes, play would always start with a trailer, but that could be skipped with one button press. On the other hand, it would have saved a lot of trouble by eliminating the need to maintain separate records and views to handle the trailers. I've good some cool trailer views, but they're not very practical unless I happen to be in mood to view a bunch of trailers. It's a PITA to select a movie based on it's trailer, then have to navigate to movie view to find and watch the movie.

BTW, this went nowhere when I pleaded for it in September 2009. Maybe with both of us pushing it, they'll do it just to shut us up.

[glynor]

Trailers would also be a great use for this, I agree!  Good idea!

Other ways might work, but I would really like to see the ability to integrate it into Theater View.  Choosing the stack member via the OSD like switching an audio track would be slick too.  No idea how hard it would be to pull off, but if it could be done, it'd be sweet.

I could probably live with the Play Stack command method for Theater View, but having it just drill down an extra "level" into the stack (only if a stack is present for that file, and only if the hypothetical Open Stacks box is checked for that view) would be cleaner and more "Theater View" like, I think.

[glynor]

I stacked some of my extras as a test.  It works great in Standard View.  The stacked files can have their own tags and still be a stack member (so [Name] and [Description] don't have to match).  Theater View support of some kind would really "make it" as the method for dealing with these things.

[rick.ca]

I could probably live with the Play Stack command method for Theater View, but having it just drill down an extra "level" into the stack (only if a stack is present for that file, and only if the hypothetical Open Stacks box is checked for that view) would be cleaner and more "Theater View" like, I think.

I was about to ask if you would want unique information about stack members displayed, or if just the filenames would suffice. This suggests the former. I was going to suggest if it were just the filename (and in many cases, like the trailer example, that would probably be enough) then a simple pop-up would do. And that might be handled in the same way "Play" and "Play All" are handled now. If your last used/default (for stacked items) was "Play" then "Okay" would play the stack. If "Select Stack Item" was the last used/default, then a pop-up listing the stack members would allow you to select one to play.

I hadn't thought about it before, but if a "Play Stack" function were offered, it would be reasonable to expect the OSD would allow selection of stack members. It would be analogous to selecting a chapter of a DVD, and surely wouldn't be difficult to implement. For video, that would be all I would need. For audio, if this has any application there, I suppose one isn't normally using Display View, and better integration in Theatre View would be necessary.