Allow the ability to link a specific TV Special or other TV Show Episode to a season Episode and display linked items below the selected Episode when in the Episode’s page like Movie Specials are displayed.
In TV / console apps where you do not navigate into the episode page, the linked specials can be displayed directly below the play, watched, more buttons (looking at apple-tv right now) and above the Credits section.
Example would be the ability to link/relate the Extended Scene for Season 1 Star Trek.: Discovery episode “Battle of the Binary Stars” to that episode so when on the selection for that episode you can quickly get to that related special.
This could also be used for episodes that have special versions of the episode. For example, an episode that did not have the commentary track as a separate track from the main audio but instead has separate file with the commentary, you can quickly get to that commentary version of the episode.
Yep… you can already do that (feature has been implemented for some time).
Only downside is that as of today not all clients are capable to display local extras for all tiers of a tv-show (see matrix in the support article linked by drahn). There’s an existing feature suggestion asking to close this gap.
Edit: for reference… here’s an episode level extra in the iOS client.
I was unaware of the local files feature and just tested this out and I see how this works.
I was requesting something that would provide greater flexibility. The ability to link to an episode in the meta data of the special/extra or another even another series episode is more what I was looking for.
An example would be: in addition to the series Star Trek: Discovery, I also have the series Star Trek: Short Treks. I like having Short Treks this in its own series but an episode of Short Treks directly relates to a Star Trek: Discovery episode. I would like to see the ability to not only link the the extras, but also a related episode from another series as these series are all part of the same universe but are still distinct series without having to duplicate the file in both the Short Treks folder and the Discovery Season folder as an extra. For extras it is not an issue to use the local files feature as it would just mean moving a file out of the specials folder and putting it into the season folder with the proper naming convention, but for related episodes that will duplicate files and take more storage space.
You might want to take a look at the concept of „hard links“. This allows using the same physical file from different places.
If you’re looking for a simpler approach you might also consider adding both shows to the same collection. This way, they’ll be listed as related content (although only on the show level).
Not sure if you’ve been able to catch up on the ideas from my last post. When digging a bit deeper I’ve noticed we’ve had that very same discussion some time ago with a different user (also concluding that hard links might be the way to go). So in case you still want to pursue this suggestion, please comment/vote in the existing thread in order to help us avoid distracting or cannibalizing votes (closing this one as a duplicate).
