Arbitrary episode count

[ConnorKrammer]

I skimmed the develop branch but couldn't tell if this was addressed, so forgive me if this has already been done:

There are a fair number of series where it's more useful to view two or more seasons as being one group of consecutive episodes. You get this in batch releases especially, where (for example) season one has 13 episodes and season 2 has 12 episodes. The files are numbered 1-25, and this makes sense because you can just watch straight through them.

Right now if you want Taiga to recognize Season 1 and Season 2 as distinct, they can't be placed in the same folder. This means that you need to split the seasons up (or give them some sort of identifier in the filename), then rename them so they both start from 1 and not, say, 14. In other cases OVAs can actually be ".5" episodes, taking place in the middle of a series. Sora no Woto, for example, has two OVAs -- episode 7.5 and 13. Even though MAL and Hummingbird both keep the OVAs in their own database entry, it feels conceptually weird not to have them in the same folder as the rest of the episodes.

I'm not sure what the best way to handle this is, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Overall Taiga is fantastic, and I'm very glad it exists. Keep up the good work!

[erengy]

Hi there @ConnorKrammer,

This issue was previously discussed in #58, and now there's a solution in place. It doesn't handle ".5" episodes yet (which would require a different approach and some changes to the filename parser), but it's able to forward overflowing episode numbers (e.g. episode 13 of Sora no Woto) to a different anime (e.g. episode 2 of Sora no Woto Specials).

I'm not entirely sure if there are enough cases to justify adding support for episode numbers with a fractional part, but I'll look into this.

[ConnorKrammer]

Oh, I see. What was the deciding factor for going with the in-house database option?

My personal inclination would be to use the database as a smart default, and allow users to manually set a "starting number" for a series. One problem with this solution is that it still doesn't handle incremental episodes unless you allow episode-by-episode control. If you want users to be able to get really technical, you could allow them to specify series-by-series name recognition schemes using regex or a regex subset (I think this is what you're already doing -- so the change would be to allow setting which recognition scheme is used). So Sora no Woto would use the default scheme, and Sora no Woto Specials would use a rule like /Sora no Woto - (3.5|13)/.

A somewhat different solution would be to allow "compiling" multiple entries together. Two seasons could be bundled together, resulting in one continuous sequence of episodes. MAL does have information about sequels and such, so you might even be able to automatically detect what the viewing order should be.

I suppose the main issue is that control competes with usability, and you're operating in a domain with some pretty weird properties. I'm not sure if you're familiar with The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, but it has two different episode orders and can't really be considered to have separate seasons, even though it was aired in two batches. The first airing was just the first half of the show, and wasn't in chronological order, while the second airing was in chronological order and included another ~12 episodes which were mixed in with the others.

My personal preference would be a combination of the database, specified starting index, and custom recognition rules, under some advanced setting so they don't bother most people. Of course, I tend towards the power-user side of the software spectrum. I definitely appreciate the UX issues that arise here, though.

Anyway, that got a bit long. Thanks for reading through it.