Shuffle series randomisation and/or weighting

tom-stafford

The standard shuffle algorithm for TV episodes across multiple series inadvertently ends up playing a TV series that has more episodes more than those that have less episodes. For example, if you create a shuffled channel schedule of Seinfeld (180 episodes) combined with Better Off Ted (26 episodes), you'll end up with a lot more Seinfeld episodes on your schedule, with the odd Better Off Ted show here and there. That's maybe an extreme example, but it's easy to end up with one or two series dominating a channel playout just because they have so many episodes.

What I would love is to be able to create a schedule playout that either (a) shuffles a channel based on TV series and then pick a random episode from that series, and/or (b) apply a per-series weighting to the shuffle algorithm to prioritise certain series.

darkaegis

I'll put a second request in for this. I know that technically we can make multiple entries in the schedule - one for each show - to balance playback, but that's a huge pain when I've got channels pushing 30-40 different shows in a cycle and one has 7x as many episodes as the rest.

Great program regardless, but that'd just be the cherry on top!

tom-stafford

Just adding some more comments here after a bit of poking around.

According to this github feature request, it could be possible now to have a balanced shuffle using Fill With Group Mode.

I'm not 100% sure I've got it right, but the way I've set it up currently is:
Collection Type: Collection (I've got a collection set up with several TV shows)
Playback Order: Shuffle
Playout Mode: Multiple
Multiple Count: 1
Fill With Group Mode: Shuffled Groups

There's no proper doco currently for the Fill With Group Mode but I think this setup should shuffle by TV show, playing one episode, and then moving on to the next one. Hopefully I've got it set up right!

darkaegis

tom-stafford Oh, thank you! I think that's actually worked for me. At least so far, it seems like my game show channel is properly shuffling despite some shows being lopsided on episode count. Thanks again!