[mythtv-users] Videos - how to use it properly with large collections

Stephen Worthington stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz
Sat Feb 27 11:57:28 UTC 2021


On Sat, 27 Feb 2021 09:39:41 +0000, you wrote:

>I've been making more use of the Videos section over the last few months with moving boxsets from dvd to files. This has spured watching content chronologically rather than pot luck order via recording their broadcasted version.
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>What we're finding is that it's very hard to keep track of where we're up to. typically we know which season, but the episode is much more difficult to know so ends up browsing where we think we are, starting playback to find if we have a bookmark and ultimately exiting and playing the next file till we stumble upon the correct one.
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>I think it's a case of the streaming services having both 'resume watching' which will immediately resume playback from your recent media (as does emby and plex iirc), and they also seem to have better visibility as you browse content on whether they've been watched or not.
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>are there any options i've overlooked that would make mythtv Videos more user/WAF friendly in this respect?
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>liveTV/recordings side is much easier to see progress but feels like the Videos area is archaic and massive overhaul is required to bring it inline with other solutions.
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>I can completely see how Videos would work better with films which are a single file  you'd typically watch in it's entirety, but for TV boxsets it seems much more difficult to keep track of where you are.

There is nothing that is very friendly that I know of.  I have used
several different strategies.  If I am not going to want to watch the
series again, I just delete the watched files as soon as I finish
watching them.  If I do want to watch them again, then I have tried
just writing down on a piece of paper which episode I am up to, and
also doing the same in the Notes app of my cellphone.  That works well
but is annoying, and you have to remember to do it.  One other
possible way to do it that I have not tried is to have a "watched"
directory or subdirectory and move the watched files to that.  But
moving files around is not an available function of the Videos code,
so it would need to be done from a command prompt or files app.

If you have truly lost track of what you were watching last night,
then you can look in the mythfrontend.log file and see what you last
played:

grep mythplayer /var/log/mythtv/mythfrontend.log | grep OpenFile

or for the rotated log files:

grep mythplayer /var/log/mythtv/mythfrontend.log.* | grep OpenFile

This will list all the recordings you played also, but it is obvious
which is which.  You have to do it before the mythfrontend.log* files
have been rotated and the old information deleted - how long that
takes will depend on how much you use mythfrontend.  You can alter the
logrotate settings (in the /etc/logrotate.d/mythfrontend file in
Ubuntu) if you want to keep larger logs or more rotated files.  Log
rotation normally happens at midnight.  In Ubuntu, it uses the
logrotate.service and logrotate.timer systemd units to do this.


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