Proposed New Features
Last updated April 8, 2023
This Wiki page is to present new feature proposals for users to comment and provide feedback. Features that are adopted will be removed. Please use either the Mezzmo forum or the Kodi forum to provide feedback on the proposed features or to recommend others. Your feedback will guide the development.
Thanks,
Jeff
Added April 8, 2022
Planned for Q2 2023
Mezzmo movie previews is a feature which would give you a movie theater like experience where you can play up to a selected amount of trailers before playing the main movie. It would leverage the Mezzmo Kodi Addon Local Movie Trailers feature, be launched by the context menu and have a few option settings.
Potential settings options:
- Number of previews to play (1-10)
- Previews from the year the movie was released to recreate the original movie experience
- Previews from the current year with a playcount of 0 in your library for a modern previews experience of unwatched movies
Added December 31, 2022
Planned for Q2 2023
The Mezzmo Kodi addon was originally designed for GUI mode operation with syncing to Kodi added later to take advantage of Kodi's ability to display actor information and perform quick searches. Improvements for native mode support for Kodi, was added in 2022 beginning with versions 1.1.5.5 and 2.1.5.5 . However, due to the current sync design the sync process runs hourly which means that native mode users can see a delay syncing new Mezzmo content and bookmark / resume pointer changes of up to an hour in Kodi. GUI mode users see it all real time because GUI mode reads from the Mezzmo server directly whereas native mode reads from the Kodi database.
The fast sync proposal would reduce the new content and bookmark / resume pointer sync time for native mode to 60 seconds or less. The fast sync option will check the Mezzmo server once a minute for new library content or bookmark / resume pointer changes and sync them to the Kodi database. The hourly and daily sync processes would continue to operate as normal but this fast sync feature would get Kodi sync for native mode to near real time. Mezzmo has added support for this with a patch to version 6.0.7.14 and higher. Addon development for this feature has begun, including the ability to detect the version of the Mezzmo server the addon is syncing with.
Added August 4, 2022
Updated February 5 2023 - Functionality added as a subset of new feature, Mezzmo Keywords. Added to v1.1.7.6 and v2.1.7.6
The concept of Quick Play is similar to other addons like Super Favorites and similar where you can play your most favorite videos (movies, TV episodes, home videos etc..) by opening the context menu from anywhere without the need for managing yet another addon. It would be built into the Mezzmo Kodi addon as another feature. I am initially thinking it would be driven by Mezzmo keywords (aka tags for Kodi) but with a special naming and via the Mezzmo Kodi Sync process it would sync to all Kodi clients. The feature could be enabled or disabled via the addon settings. No manual syncing / copying of data for each Kodi client like with other solutions. A stretch option would be, in addition to the centrally driven Mezzmo keyword lists, to allow clients to also manage their own local Quick Play lists but they would be local to a client. I am less inclined for this since it breaks the overall simplicity of the feature.
Here's an example of how the Quick Play feature might look like with a few movies where I added the keywords "QPLAY My Favs 1 and QPLAY My Favs 2" in the Mezzmo library:
When you open the context menu the Mezzmo menu item is there as it is already.
Next in the context menu you will see a new menu item called Mezzmo Quick Play. It could be anywhere in the menu. In this case I just put it at the bottom for this quick mock up.
Clicking on the Mezzmo quick Play menu item will provide a listing of different Quick Play groups, in this case My Favs 1 and My Favs 2. The Mezzmo Kodi addon would strip QPLAY from name. QPLAY or similar is needed to differentiate Quick Play tags from normal movie tags which get added to Kodi's tags. Otherwise all tags would show up as a Quick Play group. With Quick Play we are only wanting your favorites.
Lastly, when you click on a group you will see all the movies you have tagged as Quick Play (i.e. your favorites). There are two possible options at this point, a simple list or a standard Kodi video listing with all the metadata. The simple list is much easier to code vs. the full Kodi listing and I am wondering since these are your most favorite movies, is all of the metadata really necessary. I am open to suggestions here but I am thinking most people know their favorites pretty well already.
Simple list option
Full Kodi List option
Added August 28, 2022
Updated January 26, 2023 - New feature Added to v1.1.7.3 and v2.1.7.3
Mezzmo and the Mezzmo Kodi addon fully support movie sets automatically and if enabled in the addons settings they are synchronized to the Kodi database. However accessing movie sets is different between GUI and native modes and can require multiple menu moves to get to displaying movie sets.
This movie set proposal adds a content menu item for movie sets (if the current movie you select the context menu is part of a movie set) and then if you click on Mezzmo Movie Set all of the movies in the set will be quickly displayed.
Current native mode context menu
Proposed native mode context menu
Movie set displayed (in this case in order of release date in ascending order)
Added August 28, 2022
Updated January 29, 2023 - New feature Mezzmo Movie Collection added to v1.1.7.4 and v2.1.7.4
Movie versions are where you want to have multiple versions of the same movie but the versions are unique but grouped. Examples could be different formats (i.e. 1090P, 4K, etc), different cuts (i.e. theatrical, director's etc..) or different years / versions of the same movie. Other UPnP solutions often require complicated naming or file layout structures. The Mezzmo proposed solution would simply need a Mezzmo keyword like ##version or similar added to the movies. Using keywords would avoid having to rename files, create special file structure layouts or similar. The Mezzmo keyword would not be synchronized to Kodi tags and would be used only by the Mezzmo Kodi addon to find multiple versions of the same movie. Like with the movie set proposal there would be an additional context menu item if multiple versions of the selected movie exists.
Example versions with different format
Updated August 30, 2022 - New feature Added to v1.1.6.5 and v2.1.6.5
Currently the Mezzmo Kodi addon allows clearing of the Mezzmo data in the Kodi database via the addon settings option Kodi DB clear Mezzmo data on startup. The rebuilding of the Mezzmo data in the Kodi database is controlled by the Mezzmo Background Sync settings. As long as it isn't disabled it will detect the out of sync condition and begin the rebuild process. This can take up to 6 hours since the sync process does 1/6th of the Mezzmo database each hour, to avoid bogging down Kodi.
This Immediate Full Sync proposal would modify the Kodi DB clear Mezzmo data on startup option to have three conditions: Off, Clear and Full Resync. Off and clear would operate like off and on do today. Full resync would do a clear but then also do a full sync and provide a progress dialog box so you can see the progress of the sync process. Immediate Full Resync would allow you to speed up the process and not have to wait 6 hours or till the daily sync process runs between midnight and 6AM.
The downside of this option is that while the progress bar is up you wouldn't be able to use Kodi to play media. However, if you hit cancel the sync process would stop wherever it is at and the normal hourly sync process would finish synchronization between Mezzo and Kodi in the background.
Updated September 21, 2022 - New feature Added to v1.1.6.6 and v2.1.6.6
The Mezzmo Kodi addon, like a number of other synchronization solutions which sync Kodi data to an external source, is an all or nothing solution except for parental controls. Even with parental controls it becomes an all or nothing per device so if you wanted to run multiple profiles in Kodi, each with a different view of your Mezzmo library in Kodi, that currently isn't supported by the addon or many other external sync solutions.
What this proposal may provide is up to 4 different user selectable, fully customizable, sync profiles for your Kodi instances. These can be shared across Kodi instances and tied to your Kodi profiles.
Here's how it might work. First, in Mezzmo you would create a smart playlist for each sync profile with a special name tag that the Mezzmo Kodi Addon would tie to your Kodi profile and/or device. There are a couple of specific items that would need to be in the smart playlist, specifically be located at the video level in your Mezzmo library, have a tag in the name of ###1, ###2, ###3 or ###4, and be sorted by most recently added. Everything else could leverage the full power of the Mezzmo smart playlists.
In this example I chose to sync two folders with the smart playlist name of "Shared Folders ###1". The Shared Folders part of the name is irrelevant and can be anything you want. The ###1 is the important part.
The second step would be to select the associated tag in the Mezzmo Kodi addon native mode settings. The new selective sync setting would have 5 options, All, ###1, ###2, ###3 and ###4 which would align to special tags in the smart playlists with the default setting being All. If you wanted to change what is shared via the sync process you simply would update the smart playlist criteria on Mezzmo which would either then be picked up automatically by the hourly / daily sync process on each Kodi instance or you could force an immediate between Kodi and Mezzmo in the recently added feature above.
The new selective sync setting would only be visible if Kodi Native Mode Sync is enabled, which controls the overall sync process. It also would have a safety feature that if the selected smart playlist tag isn't found on Mezzmo it would fall back to synchronizing everything and write a message to the sync logs indicated the selective sync tag wasn't found. An option could be to have a popup user notification but that might be more difficult to track state and avoid multiple popups, unless it also resets the addon setting back to All when a tag isn't found.
