Play Last 5 Seasons Of a TV Show

josephtrainer

I have tried playing around with smart filters using released_inthelast but doesn't seem to work how I want. I am looking to setup a number of TV shows so it only plays more recent seasons of the show. Is there a good way to do that where it just plays the last 5 seasons

jason

This is not possible with smart collections - specifically, you can't look at one item's season number metadata on its own (like 4) and know anything about other content (other seasons). You would have to manually maintain the season cutoffs.

Fields like released_inthelast work because they still filter based on each item independently, the queries are just translated to date ranges. released_inthelast:"2 days" turns into e.g. release_date:[20250906 TO 20250908]. It doesn't depend on values from any other media items, just "today".

jason

There are a couple options to make this work automatically, but they require some scripting.

Sequential schedules allow you to source content from a search query in the YAML file, which you could update in a single place, either manually or from a script. See https://ersatztv.org/docs/scheduling/sequential/

Also, scripted schedules in the latest develop build let you add content in a similar way, using your language of choice (ETV provides an OpenAPI definition to generate the API client that can be used for scheduling).

Happy to help with either option.