RFC TV shows and Season-X



No, it’s not a new Elon Musk thing I am wondering if users and skin designer really prefer the 2×1 style of  season and episode naming in Kodi over S/E notation.  It seems pretty common browsing through skins but that could just be historical based on the fact that it what the LabelFormatter providers via the H types https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master…r.cpp#L286

This post is primarily about the Estuary skin since from TV shows “Season 2 Episode 1” would be 2×1 and from PVR and the Videoplayer  Kodi would use S2E1 sinc Estuary uses both.  For me it makes more sense to give the user a common format.  An example would be playing a TV show from the library it is 2×1 and then on on the video player it is S2E1.   However I am curious how other skins have implemented this. Is Estuary the only one displaying different formats.

If there was enough interest from skinners on an SE standard, I’d actually more being done in LabelFormattter.  Currently all skins have to go through the multiple conditions for potential TV Show and then having to format it one way or the other, core can do this much easier   Estuary even uses a mix for x notation with and without zero padding.

There’s a secondary consideration since from PVR it is already possible to have episode with no season, optionally followed by the total number of episodes for a short run series. This is very common in the UK.  Skinners may want to consider  whether a digit by itself looks 2 is better than E2 or with parts 2/5 vs E2/5.  I guess it could be an “x” but x2 and x2/5 aren’t that logical to me and could be confusing.  To make it worse, it looks like LabelFormatter prefixes S instead of E.

I definitely prefer S/E notation so it is hard to be objective myself but I really think skins shouldn’t have to do as much as they to display this information or to migrate to S/E should they choose.  Then again if everyone generally prefers x notation maybe Estuary PVR is wrong to mix so many formats.

I did prepare a page with Estuary using S/E notation https://imgur.com/a/SFmEqGP The change isn’t drastic but resistance to change is. Comments welcome, not doubt there will be whiners if there is any change but a common look is important to me.

Martin