Playback Reporting

[TeamB 2411]

back it up now and it will give you a TSV file to play with, you can edit it and then re-import it.

 

 

 

[griam01 12]

@TeamBI am looking for a query that will report on movies or tvshows that were never played if someone could assist.  Thanks in advance for your time. 

Edited August 22, 2022 by griam01

[TeamB 2411]

2 hours ago, griam01 said:

@TeamBI am looking for a query that will report on movies or tvshows that were never played if someone could assist.  Thanks in advance for your time. 

Sorry that is not possible. The plugin keeps records of what is played by who and when, it does not know anything about what has not been played so can not report on that.

 

[seanbuff 1092]

hey @TeamB is it possible to get some alignment around what Emby reports as 'Direct Play' and what the Playback Reporting plugin reports as 'Direct Stream' ?

Example, I have two sessions running currently, which Emby sees as 'Direct Play':

 

However if I look in the Playback Reporting active sessions, it reports them as 'Direct Stream':

 

This obviously skews the reporting somewhat, but the plugin is able to report 'Direct Play' correctly for some (i just don't know when)


TIA!

[TeamB 2411]

the plugin just uses the text from the session it gets from Emby, it is using what emby server thinks it is doing, it does not try to apply any logic itself.

https://github.com/faush01/playback_reporting/blob/54bfa5ab97452d8ad6e65492e9b2d2a822c39e7d/playback_reporting/EventMonitorEntryPoint.cs#L270

play_method = session.PlayState.PlayMethod.Value.ToString();

As you can see it is not applying any logic to the session info.

[seanbuff 1092]

35 minutes ago, TeamB said:

As you can see it is not applying any logic to the session info.

I see. Thanks for the info.

So I guess this is a question for @Luke then, is there a reason the Dashboard reports something different to the underlying session info?

And in that case, what defines a true 'Direct Play' as is reported sometimes?

[Luke 39645]

8 hours ago, seanbuff said:

I see. Thanks for the info.

So I guess this is a question for @Luke then, is there a reason the Dashboard reports something different to the underlying session info?

And in that case, what defines a true 'Direct Play' as is reported sometimes?

No conversion means direct.

[Chiefmas 30]

I just want to say thanks for the great plugin! This looks like it'll plug the Tautulli shaped hole I had from migrating from Plex.

Quick question, is there a place I can see the database schema so I can write my own queries easier?

Thanks again!

[TeamB 2411]

on the query tab just use the simple saved query to select * from the table to give you all the fields, there is only one table.

[Thuzad 48]

By the way, do any of you have any cool SQL queries?

Here are mine:

- Count unique users per day

SELECT date(DateCreated) AS Date, COUNT(DISTINCT UserId) as Users
FROM PlaybackActivity WHERE DateCreated between date('now', 'start of day','-6 months') and date('now', 'start of day', '+1 day')
GROUP BY date(DateCreated)
ORDER BY date(DateCreated) ASC

 

- Count unique users per month

SELECT DISTINCT strftime('%Y-%m', DateCreated) AS Date, COUNT(DISTINCT UserId) as Users
FROM PlaybackActivity WHERE DateCreated between date('now', 'start of day','-24 months') and date('now', 'start of day', '+1 day')
GROUP BY Date
ORDER BY Date ASC

 

If you want to display a graph like this you must set these options :

 

Edited October 13, 2022 by Thuzad

[gene0915 40]

Was messing around in the playback reporting plugin and noticed something weird...... look at the bottom of the screenshot. You can see where it says, "Breakdown by TV Shows". The problem is though, I can't scroll down to see everything:

 

However, if I zoom the page down to 30%, I can see more but it's sort of kind of hard to read:

 

 

Is this a browser problem or a plugin issue? (Using Firefox 102.5.0esr on Debian 11.4 and Emby server 4.7.10.0)

 

[Happy2Play 9352]

6 minutes ago, gene0915 said:

Using Firefox 102.5

Why so old?  But do not see an issue on 107.0.1, Windows, 4.7.10.0.

[TeamB 2411]

@gene0915 are you able to try a different browser?

Do other plugins that go off the page have issues scrolling?

[Happy2Play 9352]

Note Firefox 102 had other issues also in Emby hover options. @gene0915

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/109590-4800-beta-hover-menu-missing-firefox

 

[gene0915 40]

On 12/1/2022 at 7:43 PM, Happy2Play said:

Why so old?  But do not see an issue on 107.0.1, Windows, 4.7.10.0.

My FF version is old because I'm using Debian. Debian is a good distro (especially for servers) since its' packages are 'stable' and don't change much. I tried running Emby on an Arch based distro and while Emby was fine, updates (since it's a rolling distro) would SOMETIMES break things.

Plus, since I use Plex on the same box, if I EVER had problems with their app, their support staff would point out I'm not using an officially supported of Linux and I was on my own. But I'm happy to announce that this was indeed the problem. Using a newer browser from my Windows box, the problem disappeared.

 

 

[gene0915 40]

On 12/1/2022 at 8:09 PM, TeamB said:

@gene0915 are you able to try a different browser?

Do other plugins that go off the page have issues scrolling?

A newer browser did indeed fix the problem. Sorry about the false alarm. It's my old version of FF that is the problem.

 

[horstepipe 373]

a little request @TeamB

Would you mind adding a sorting option (by Devices, Clients, Users etc.) at the Active Clients screen?

[amb13 18]

Hi. Would it be possible add tracking for if an item was marked as played when the playback stopped?

[TeamB 2411]

9 hours ago, amb13 said:

Hi. Would it be possible add tracking for if an item was marked as played when the playback stopped?

this was how the plugin originally worked, it would just track when playback stopped and if the played watched status was true it would count that as a playback action. While this did work it did not work very well, playbacks were missed due to users stopping and starting, leaving things mostly played etc, the results were never accurate or complete so i gave up on that and now just track playback activity start and stop activity, this also lets you calculate total play activity duration etc.

 

[amb13 18]

On 18/01/2023 at 22:13, TeamB said:

this was how the plugin originally worked, it would just track when playback stopped and if the played watched status was true it would count that as a playback action. While this did work it did not work very well, playbacks were missed due to users stopping and starting, leaving things mostly played etc, the results were never accurate or complete so i gave up on that and now just track playback activity start and stop activity, this also lets you calculate total play activity duration etc.

 

I totally understand that. It works great now for everything that has to do with time. Like how long you watched movies or tv show. But I feel does not work very well for play amounts. If someone has a trouble with a file, or has to take a few pauses while watching a movie, suddenly a movie is watched 5 times according to to this plugin. It's at a point where the plays breakdown is only useful for finding users or files that struggle the most with playback (though that can be valuable in itself). 

Could something like tracking time spent watching a movie and then comparing it to the total length of that movie be used tot track number of plays? Say if you watch a total of 118 minutes of a movie and the movie is 125 minutes long it then counts it as one play. Or if you watched for 354 minutes it's three plays.

[TeamB 2411]

2 hours ago, amb13 said:

or has to take a few pauses while watching a movie

pausing a file is not included in the play count or total time watched calculation. you have to stop and start a movie to inc the play count.

there are probably some metrics around actual play time and item duration that you could extract but I dont have any plans at the moment to add that.

 

[amb13 18]

3 hours ago, TeamB said:

pausing a file is not included in the play count or total time watched calculation. you have to stop and start a movie to inc the play count.

there are probably some metrics around actual play time and item duration that you could extract but I dont have any plans at the moment to add that.

 

Yeah, I meant pausing the movie by stopping and starting. Good to know though.

Oki. I see that you combine all play counts in a single day into one item in the summary at least

Could a middle ground be to exclude all plays that are shorter then something like 5% of total runtime? Or at least an option for it?

[TeamB 2411]

5 hours ago, amb13 said:

Oki. I see that you combine all play counts in a single day into one item in the summary at least

i think this is only on the summary page though.

5 hours ago, amb13 said:

Could a middle ground be to exclude all plays that are shorter then something like 5% of total runtime? Or at least an option for it?

what problem are you trying to solve here? do you have users that start and stop playback a lot? if so then you can look at the playback times instead of play counts to help track user playback usage.

the intent of the plugin is to help track usage, number of plays is useful however as you have seen it can be effected by the viewing habits of users, users that break up their playback of an item into chunks or watch a movie over multiple nights will effect the counts so counts can not be used as absolute stand alone number. Time spent playing an item is a good indicator but when trying to work out the popularity of an item then total duration of items becomes important as discussed above.

this is the same sort of tracking/metric problem that you get when trying to analyse web traffic on a web site, the way that is handled there is using session or blocks of time a user is active.

as you pointed out one way is to compare the total item playback time to the item duration per user and if it is 90% then consider that a play count for each item for a given time period. probably doable, much more complex, a bunch of extra work, more prone to misunderstanding, harder to explain.

another solution is a merge option to merge all playback for an item for a user within a given time window (a few hours) into the one session. this is in line with the way web traffic is analysed and you would have to work out the best time window etc while i say this is an option it is not something i have looked at from a code point of view and dont know how viable it would be with the current code base.

Edited January 21, 2023 by TeamB

[Darkseidd 59]

hi,

 

I would to ask , if there is any setting, for Playback Reporting to ignore specific library?

[TeamB 2411]

36 minutes ago, Darkseidd said:

hi,

 

I would to ask , if there is any setting, for Playback Reporting to ignore specific library?

there is no option to ignore or include only certain libraries