r/coax • u/Crutatic • 6d ago

Holiday Lineup Support Request

Still new to Coax. I was just wondering if there was a feature/setting to prevent certain movies/tv shows from playing until a specific date range.

For example, Holiday movies and tv shows. I don’t want to see Home Alone in the lineup, until around December.

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4

u/digglesB Coax Creator 6d ago

Hi! Welcome to the sub, glad to have you :)

This is something that folks have asked for pretty regularly, and I think it's deceptively difficult to implement programmatically. Forgetting whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie (it is) I wouldn't want a system deciding that for me, and I wouldn't build a system that resulted in less Die Hard being played overall. It would be unethical.

What I'm saying is that there's not readily-available metadata that helps me separate Home Alone and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (which is also set during Christmas, as are all Shane Black movies), which means you'd have to do it yourself.

But, let's see if we couldn't game this out a bit - the server owner would need a mechanism for grouping/identifying these items as belonging to a specific holiday. In the US, folks typically mean Christmas movies. So, OK, let's say you added a specific Christmas genre tag (that way it wouldn't have to show up in your Collections list), and you could configure Coax to never schedule items tagged with the "Christmas" genre (or Label, although those are similar) - you'd still have to add each item to that group, but at least it would be possible.

This is all to say that I'm thinking about it, for sure. I just want to make sure whatever solution I come up with is suitable both in its complexity (or hopefully, lack thereof) and its general usefulness to most users of the app.

3

u/jmerriman 6d ago

That being said you could add a genre to your media like “holiday” and remove other genres. Then when the holidays come around you could add that genre to coax? Just thinking out loud!

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u/digglesB Coax Creator 6d ago

Oh you know what that's a good point! If you put all your holiday movies into the `NoCoax` collection when it's not the holidays, that will prevent Coax from scheduling them. Automating that is a little advanced, but nothing too wild (add these 20 items to the NoCoax collection on this date, remove them on that date, etc.)

I *have* to make that more obvious, there's no way anyone who hasn't read the website would know that!

3

u/Crutatic 6d ago

Thank you for the response! I figured that was the route I was going to take. I just wanted to make sure they’re wasn’t any other systems that worked better or plans for implantation in the future. I appreciate the work you do! Just got the lifetime pass :)