Addon forgets what was already seen

[dagwieers]

Describe the bug
I don't know yet what caused this, and I can't remember having seen this in the past usage of the addon. But stuff I have already seen is no longer marked as such, especially if it's been some time.

I would expect every item has a unique identifier and this identifier is used to recognize if it was seen before (stored somewhere in an internal database). But I don't think we store such an identifier, so at some point it gets lost if the content is "rewritten".

[pietje666]

Issue #42

fixed with commit 0b08f7a

this needs to be set
=>> xbmcplugin.setContent(int(self._handle), "episodes")

[mediaminister]

"Resume from" and the check mark for watched programs works perfect for me. It works consistently in every menu throughout the whole addon.

@dagwieers Can you specify a bit more when it doesn't work for you?

[dagwieers]

@mediaminister It's simple, I don't know when it started, but I can see that older content is no longer tagged as seen. Newer content is correctly tagged as seen, but I don't know for how long until that is "forgotten" too. I was hoping maybe adding an dbid or something like that could help in better retaining this kind of information ?

[dagwieers]

It's hard to know if it is fixed unless it happens again (but this time I'll hopefully be more aware to when it exactly started to happen).

[dagwieers]

@pietje666 Does it have to say int(self._handle) ? All the other usages use self._handle directly.

xbmcplugin.setContent(int(self._handle), "episodes")

I may have inadvertently removed the in()...

[pietje666]

Not sure, i remembered that i copied it from another addon. Since i could not find the culprit

[mediaminister]

That is not the cause, self._handle is already an int: https://github.com/pietje666/plugin.video.vrt.nu/blob/c25ac8c8f6924b337620a280811c9ffc970d5319/plugin.video.vrt.nu/addon.py#L21

I think we first have to understand how this functionality works before messing around.

[dagwieers]

Agreed, and always document why something is done especially if it is not obvious.

PS For some of the metadata I map to ListItem InfoLabels, I am not sure if it has any effect. Some of them at least don't have a visual effect. I think we may have to re-evaluate this later.

[dagwieers]

Also leave the possibility open that for this issue either Kodi did something wrong, or I did something wrong. I have a setup with multiple LibreELEC devices uses a shared MySQL database for keeping track of what has been watched.

[mediaminister]

I think I got a clue. Kodi watched status (playCount value in files table in Kodi MyVideo db files) is probably based on the plugin://plugin.video.vrt.nu/ url's (strFilename value in db).
When adding new functionality past week, new parameters were added to these url's so all old-style url's and their watch status were lost.

For example:
New style url:
plugin://plugin.video.vrt.nu/?publication_id=pbs-pub-b52812cc-bd17-4390-af58-ca13fc64bca5&action=play&video_id=vid-35469c59-5dcd-405c-9eca-c36109bb5c12&video_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vrt.be%2Fvrtnu%2Fa-z%2Fnachtwacht1%2F2019%2Fnachtwacht1-s2019a7%2F
Old style url:
plugin://plugin.video.vrt.nu/?action=play&video=%2Fvrtnu%2Fa-z%2Fteam-scheire%2F1%2Fteam-scheire-s1a2%2F

[dagwieers]

That makes a lot of sense, but I wonder if there is a way to (rather than the URL) give it a another identifier that is stable for the future. So either the most basic URL, or simply the video_id (which should be stable).

Is that not what the dbid is for ? I have a patch available for this, but didn't know how to test it.
The other solution may be to use path which now points to this URL and could be something more stable (if it does not change the location for the end-user, which is what I fear).

[mediaminister]

I did a little test and indeed the url is the unique identifier to store playcount and "resume from" bookmarks.

I did not yet found the time to investigate this thoroughly, but I think that to make use of dbid the addon has to store all "movie data" in the database first. I don't think xbmcplugin.addDirectoryItems or xbmcplugin.setContent stores this "movie data" to the database.

Only when you play an item, a minimum of data is stored to the database to make playcount and "resume from" functionality work.

[dagwieers]

Hmm, that looks like a design issue (if we can't add a unique identifier). As it's easy to understand that those URLs are not guaranteed to be identical. To me this is not a big issue, but we may want to be sure we are not adding/changing that URL in the future. Maybe sorting by key to ensure that the order is predictable.

[dagwieers]

I think a better interface using script.module.routing (#103) is the solution to his. (So we don't have to overload the current video_url interface).
Maybe for a 2.0 release, with reorganized code so we can do more/better unit testing.