[gavinstevenson]

If you're open to the idea, I do have one request:

Adding a single enable/disable toggle in the iOS Settings for the Kodi Remote app that allows users to hide/show the trailer widget altogether, regardless of whether or not there's a working source. I ask for this because for the users who have local trailers (i.e., MOVIENAME-trailer.mkv stored alongside MOVIENAME.mkv), this trailer widget will never work (at least until Apple improves media support or a workaround is discovered that allows us to stream content to iOS devices like we can do with Kore on Android).

I don't know what kind of setup the average Kodi user has, but for anyone that uses media mangers to manage their library (which can download trailers locally), or who's been using Kodi for more than a few years (ever since local -trailer.mkv support was first added by 3rd party scrapers), I suspect a lot of them will be using local trailers and will always see the black box since they'll have a link to a -trailer.mkv in their databases/NFOs but no way to play those files in the App. Same for people running Kodi on self-contained/portable installations with poor or no internet (i.e., traveling with a laptop and an external USB drive). And that's to say nothing of the fact that sometimes, YouTube videos disappear and links break while a local -trailer.mkv will always be there.

Having a toggle in the iOS Settings page will prevent a non-functional widget from taking up valuable UI real estate in those cases and should generally improve the user experience.

[Buschel]

Let think this through. As I wrote earlier I already raised PR to only show the embedded trailer window, if a an embedded trailer link could be configured. All other trailers (local files, other URLs) will simply be ignored. This leaves two case untreated cases: youtube removes the link (which just happened to me today) or youtube does not allow embedded playback (which the App can handle, it falls back to the browser form playback). Any such issue could of course be hidden by disabling this whole feature by a user setting.

[gavinstevenson]

That seems like a solid compromise.

Doing a quick grep of my entire library, I see that ~72% of my .NFOs point to local files while the remainder either contain empty strings, point to YouTube links or lack a <trailer></trailer> tag altogether. I've built my library up over the course of ~20 years and used multiple media managers in that time, so this isn't actually all that surprising to me.

Once that PR goes through, the only thing I'll need to do is go through my library and ensure all the .NFOs only have paths pointing to local -trailer.mkv files. If there are no empty "" strings, no YouTube links, and no missing <trailer></trailer> tags, I'll be guaranteed to 1) always have a copy of a trailer that works and plays (at least, on Kore and on the physical TV when I long-press on the movie title in the iOS remote) while 2) never getting an inconsistent user experience where the trailer widget shows up on some movies and not others.

Thanks for the stellar support and communication. I wish more projects interacted with users like you guys do.

[Buschel]

You're welcome! I am glad to see a user involved this way and providing technical responses which helped to narrow this down.

For now I will just wait for the PR to get merged. You can follow TestFlight to see when this change is in the Beta-Software (current build 4562 has a performance regression with Global Search / Movie sync though, you might want to wait for next build). Thread and registration is here: https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=193.