[mythtv-users] Recently Watched Recordings

Jim Stichnoth stichnot at gmail.com
Thu Nov 29 19:30:31 UTC 2012


On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 5:41 AM, Brian Long <briandlong at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was wondering if there is some way I can query MySQL to determine which
> recordings (not videos) have been recently watched and at what time they
> were viewed.  I use a similar feature on NetFlix to ensure my kids aren't
> watching things they're not supposed to be watching.  It would be nice to
> know this information from MythTV.

My wife has asked for this feature -- not for spying on the kids, but
to help navigate large sets of recordings.  The idea would be to offer
a Previously Watched screen, similar to Watch Recordings but
sorted/grouped by timestamp of playback.  (This probably makes it more
similar to the Previously Recorded screen.)  The screen could be
filtered by recordings watched on a particular frontend, versus all
recordings watched on any frontend.  After finding the desired
recording, you could start watching it immediately, or switch to the
Watch Recordings context that was active when it was previously
watched (see example 3 below for more detail).

Example 1: You painstakingly find just the recording you want, start
watching, then accidentally hit a jump point key.  You can easily
resume watching by navigating the Previously Watched screen.

Example 2: You painstakingly find your recording, start watching, and
then decide to resume watching on a different frontend.  The
Previously Watched screen makes this much easier.

Example 3: You finally start watching your backlog of episodes from
some series.  For whatever reason, you don't delete or move into a
different recording group after watching.  If you go away and come
back after watching an episode, it could be painful to find the next
episode, so you find the last watched episode in the Previously
Watched screen, switch to its Watch Recordings context, and then
easily locate the next episode in the list.

This of course makes it (too) easy to spy on other people's viewing
habits, so options for selectively deleting viewing history would also
be in order.

Now, cool as that may be, it's probably overkill for the readonly
spying application.  I would suggest setting up a System Event
(http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythTV_System_Events) to log something
when the Playback Started event triggers.

Jim


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