[tvdiary] TV Diary 0.0.4-1 What have I really watched?

martxw

Active Member
I think I've made the last update I'm likely to do with TV Diary.
I originally started it to have the box keep track of what I've recorded and watched, so that what shows turn up in the listings I can see if it's a new edition of the show, or an old one I've already seen.
I also wanted to do daily searches across the EPG and suggest shows I might want to watch. I didn't get as far using the historical data to do that, but there is the watchlist which runs a series of queries across the EPG to partially do that.
You can then use the real time scheduling to add interesting shows.

The data I had been collecting before really only told you how long you'd been watching a programme, but that's pretty useless for determining what your favourite programmes are. If you start a show, pause it and go and do something more interesting for a couple of hours, then come back and delete it without watching any more, the statistics would have shown you watching for hours.
Then af123 updated redring so that the front panel information including where you are watching within a recording was accessible, and I updated TV Diary to keep track of exactly where within the programme you have watched.
This allows you to look back at a programme and see that you watched five minutes of a show and gave up, or whether you watched the whole thing through, maybe skipping adverts.
The intention was to feed this into working out which shows to suggest from the EPG, but having spent the last year or so getting into machine learning, I can safely say that there's no way I'm going to do that on the little processor in the Humax.
The data could be offloaded into the cloud, to feed into machine learning to start making better EPG suggestions, but I'm unlikely to have time to.

Anyway, I've been using this version myself for a year and a half, so it's pretty safe. I don't think the DB is too large: for details of absolutely everything I've recorded and watched dating back to November 2013 (when my most watched programme was Time Team on More 4) it's less than 22MB. Which is less than a couple of minutes of video.

To view the programme viewing details, the programme title is now a hyperlink which brings up a popup modal dialog.
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To recap the other information on the diary page, the icons on the right hand side are indicating that two programmes may have been watched before because the synopsis matches (deja vu), and Taskmaster has almost definitely been watched before because the repeat icon is black, meaning the programme CRID matches a past one. Clicking on those icons takes you to the Programme Search page showing when you recorded or watched that programme in the past.
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As you can see, I'd recorded this show at the end of 2016, watched it the start of 2017, and this time round I decided to watch it again anyway.


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Here's a programme I watched live, and shows that I missed the first 10 minutes of the show, but then watched it all the way through.

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I recorded tGBBO, and as you can see I watched it all the way through, skipping the ad breaks, but paused it a few times (the length of the segments indicates the number of minutes watching each minute of the show).

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My final example is This Morning, which I recorded because it sometimes has interesting segments, but I can't stand Eamonn Holmes, so you can see I watched a minute, paused to do something more interesting, then fast forwarded a watch a 2 minute bit, a longer chunk, and then another fragment, before giving up entirely.

So, it's useful for seeing what you've scheduled to watch over the next week, use the search facility to look for things in the upcoming EPG or search back through your viewing history, see whether anything you've got scheduled is something you've watched before, and now you can see how much of it you might have watched before. Finally it gives a full inventory of what you have saved.

PS: If anyone wants to see how it was done and maybe get their own ideas, the source is up at https://github.com/martxw/Humax_tvdiary
 

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Great addition to this package, I just gave it a quick run, but I am not getting the blue segments, am I missing a dependency somewhere?

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Oops. The package was one behind what I had in GitHub. There were issues with offsets for live TV, and a Cinderella bug to deal with yesterday's EPG disappearing at midnight, amongst other things.
Pushed the very latest. 0.0.4-2
 
Thanks, 0.0.4-2 working for me, I hadn't realised how often I pause a watched programme, no wonder I'm wearing out that remote button
 
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Used the package for a couple years now, mainly for the watch list feature. Great for finding programmes based on my interests . Thanks Martxw and others who have contributed :thumbsup:. Hopefully it's not retirement for the package
 
Cheers. I'll echo the thanks to those whose shoulders I've stood on. Particularly af123, whose redring upgrade last year opened up the ability to collect the data for the radar charts.
It's not retired - I use it continuously and check its continued consistency with other packages - but I've accepted I'm never going to finish the Netflix-like algorithmic suggestions in the watchlist!
The radar charts have some nerdy entertainment value, and occasionally inform whether I really did watch something I thought I had.
A big limiting factor is sitting on top of a Sqlite3 database, because all tasks (background polling & multiple REST calls) have exclusive access to the DB file, even the read-only ones.
With loads of collected data it gets a bit creaky, and I sometimes have to repeatedly click refresh because requests have timed out.
 
Is there a reason why TVDiary doesn't show manual events in the 'To Be Recorded' list? Or am I missing something in settings?
 
Is there a reason why TVDiary doesn't show manual events in the 'To Be Recorded' list? Or am I missing something in settings?
You mean watching live and hit the red record button? That's working for me. Not sure why it wouldn't go in the list.
 
No, from the WebIf Schedule page - button at the bottom 'Manual Event'. I set some of my radio recordings as repeating manual events. They don't appear in the list until after they are recorded whereas events scheduled from the EPG are there as 'To Be Recorded' as soon as they are entered.
 
Ah. The To Be Recorded list is created by joining the schedule and the EPG using the programme ID. As manual events are determined by time rather than programme ID it won't work. Sorry.
 
With the recent changes, has redring now become a dependency for TvDiary?
I noticed the TvDiary watch list is no longer populating and log shows the following.

Code:
5000    at file "/mod/sbin/tvdiary_status", line 16
4999    /mod/sbin/tvdiary_status:16: Error: couldn't read file "/mod/webif/plugin/redring/lib.jim": No such file or directory
 
Sorry, I mis-read the dependencies page, and thought redring came with webif, but it's also dependent upon webif.
If you install redring manually it should fix it.
 
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