Automatically Mark Recording as "Watched" if Watched Live

Channels DVR Server Feature Requests
#1

An annoyance with most DVRs is that if you decide to watch a program live it will still be recorded and clog up your unwatched recordings list.

I tend to set passes for all my favourite programmes so that if I’m out or doing something else, I can watch the recording. But often, I’ll just end up watching it live. This means the recording still appears as “unwatched” and so makes it harder to work out which shows in “Recordings” you have and haven’t seen, as the “unwatched” indicator isn’t always correct.

If Channels just kept an eye on any tuners being used for watching “live” and then marked any matching recordings as “watched” when the show finished, this would be a start, but comes with a few complications:

  • What if you’d just left the Apple TV on this channel and turned your TV off? Your recording would be marked as “watched” and potentially deleted, even though you hadn’t watched it.

  • What if you only watched half the show on live? (Mark the recording as half watched?)

  • What if one person was watching it live, and another person planned to watch the recording later, it could be automatically deleted if it was automatically marked as “watched”.

It would be ace if Channels was able to do something clever here to solve this issue. Maybe:

  • To avoid recordings being unexpectedly deleted automatically, perhaps a new “watched live” flag could be added? Instead of just marking it as “watched”. Then this wouldn’t get deleted automatically but would make it easier to manually delete.

  • Perhaps Channels could use user interactions to decide if someone is actually watching it or not, e.g. changing the channel at the start of a program and at the end = user probably watching the TV. Or if you press a button during the show, e.g. pause or view progress bar then Channels will know a user is actively watching.

Just brainstorming here. Anyone else have any ideas on this? Anyone know of any DVR that tries to do something similar?

#2

Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

Recently I've discovered you can "hide" a show from appearing in the "Up Next" section, so it only appears in "Recently Recorded". I've used this to help clean up my "Up Next" section a bit, so that only shows that it's important I watch evey episode for are displayed there. (i.e. shows that don't have continuation between episodes like Googlebox or chat shows don't display in "Up Next".).

But I still end up watching shows live that also get recorded and appear in Up Next as "Unwatched" which is annoying. :thinking:

#3

Problem is: Just because you watched it Live, doesn't mean everybody else in the home has, too. May not be an issue for you, but could be for others.

Maybe an optional "Mark recording as watched?" dialogue on exit from a Live program that's been watched for X%?

1 Like
#4

You could also say, just because I've watched a recording it doesn't mean the rest of my house have, so I'd say this a less common senareo as I'd say many (most?) homes mostly watch each show once, all at the same time (whether live or recorded), however it is true that it can never be 100% sure that something playing live is being watched, as you might have left the Apple TV on, but turned off the TV for example. So anything to improve this situation needs to be non-destructive and potentially optional.

#5

In our home, most recordings are not watched by all members of the family at once. I feel like it's a lot of work to implement this feature for a minor inconvenience. Just mark the show as watched in the DVR menu after you're done watching it live and its finished recording.

#6

Not necessarily. There are many ways that Channels could be made a bit cleverer in this area, not all would have to be complex.

Many incremental updates to tech and software are all about removing "minor inconveniences". That's the beauty of tech!