I need some help as I’m still struggling to achieve what I want with Trakt.
I watch lots of old TV shows and I watch them concurrently (I struggle to watch the same show for like 6 episodes in a row). Now the problem I have is that a lot of shows I watch seem to have accompanying movies, and/or specials. I have no way of getting these to show up in a chronological ordered list. Adding specials and movies to your watch list does add them to your next up to watch on the dashboard. Adding it all to a watch list doesn’t seem to work because shows drop off when you start watching them. I could add every single episode and the relevant films and episodes but is there an easy way to add all episodes from a show?
I’m sure there is a way to get all episodes, movies, and specials in a list on Trakt, but I just can’t work out an easy way to do it.
Any help would be appreciated. I dont want to miss Christmas specials or movies that tie into series that I watch.
You can create a list and put the items in there. The items that are in your own list (Not the Watchlist) do not disapear once you have watched them. But for them to appear in your dashboard, you need to watch at least one episode.
There is an option on the dashboard settings that you can click to include specials.
Anything you aren’t watching at the moment, you can hide and just unhide when you start watching.
To add all items to a list, check if anyone created a list with the chronological order of the show you want to watch. You can copy the list and edit it to fit your needs.
Personally this is what I do: Only keep things I’m currently watching in my dashboard, that means, the weekly shows, and 1 or 2 old shows I’m watching. Everything else I hide.
I have a list created with everything I want to watch. Once I want to start one item, I add this item to the watchlist. Then, it appears in my up next. It doesn’t matter that it will leave once I start watching it because it is now on my dashboard.
Unfortunately i watch thing in a slightly weird way, and having the watchlist items showing on my up next works for the way i watch. What doesnt work is the way that specials are dealt with in conjunction. Because specials are classed as their own season it means they dont come uo on “up next” in date order. If i include specials then Trakt still sees them as a separate season.
If there was an option to add all episodes of a show to a list i could work around it but i cant currently.
Its only a minor inconvenience but i dont wqnt to miss xmas specials or films that tie in to shows.
This is an interesting problem. Now that I have a Plex server (Plex also uses TMDb) I found a similar issue there that has a solution: Change the settings to give you the “Up Next” episode based on air date instead of seasons. Trakt could include a similar toggle in our settings. Unfortunately, I don’t think that this would solve the problem of movies being included in a series.
Battlestar Galactica is probably the best example of this. There are several webisodes & tangential movies that are included in the series, but in order to collect these, you need to either add Specials to your collection or add the “movies” that are essentially single “episode” version of the webisodes. (For example, in the BSG universe, “The Resistance,” and “The Face of the Enemy” are basically half episodes that were split into 10 parts for pre-YouTube/streaming web consumption.) But since those are classified as movies, they’re not included in “Up Next” when you get to them in the story.
I can’t think of a way to solve for this from a database management standpoint except for the creation of a new “Shared Universe” factor that recognizes when TV shows & movies are part of the same story (like BSG or the MCU). Ideally, you would be able to toggle this classification on and off in your settings. That would allow movies to mix in with TV shows. Given how much shared universes are growing these days, it could be a worthwhile thing to develop. I know that this is something that could be accomplished via a custom Playlist, but that doesn’t effect your Up Next queue.
Its an interesting problem indeed that seems to have come back around. Star Trek also blended movies into its overall universe, as have others largely in the cartoon worlds, Simpsons, Bobs Burgers, Pokemon, Dragonball.
It seemed to die down over the 2000s and 2010s, but now popular TV shows seems to want to cash in on movies again, Walking Dead, Peaky Blinders are both ending the shows with movies.
Specials is also just as an interesting subject, as many shows now do xmas specials or other spin off webisodes.
There is of course another issue of spin offs, but that wasnt my issue, but spin offs that people might not realise are happening are becoming very frequent now.
My initial thought was just being able to add movies to up next, they could show as single episode shows for the purposes of display. Admittedly this doesnt solve issues where people use the setting of “last watched” but for other settings like “recently aired”, “previously aired” or “random” would allow movies to show up on whats up next