PlugIn: YouTube (2015)

[Boolah]

Just tried the "What's New" menu option and it seems very, very slow. The first time I opened it, it took almost 5 and a half minutes (5:29 to be exact) to list available videos. I had a spinning circle while I was waiting. The SageTV server wasn't doing anything else at the time. Once the videos were listed, I went back to the main menu and immediately went back into the "What's New" menu and this time it only took 3 minutes (exactly 180 seconds). I had the "Maximum Items to Fetch" value set to 100 with these two attempts. I changed it to its minimum value of 50 and went back into "What's New". This time it only took 2:29.

My SageTV server is an i7-4770K with 32GB of RAM and only runs SageTV (v7.1.9.256) and Plex on Windows 7. I also have 19 favorite YouTube channels in Sage and I'm on a symmetric 75 Mbps fiber connection. Let me know if you need any other info with my setup.

One other thing I noticed is that a lot of the videos I'd mostly watched still showed up in the "What's New" listing. The watched bar on the videos showed >90%, but there was no watched checkmark on the video. Perhaps you could add an option to allow us to choose if a video is >x% watched it's automatically marked as watched.

[wubdich]

Originally Posted by Boolah

JPerhaps you could add an option to allow us to choose if a video is >x% watched it's automatically marked as watched.

Videos can be marked as watched manually be hitting the watched button on the remote control or CTRL+W on keyboard

[wubdich]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

Post here if you have any problems. And if you have suggestions for improvements or enhancements I'd like to hear them as well.

The "Whats's new feature" in beta version 0.12 is great - just needs some speed improvement as Boolah mentioned. The icing on the cake would be to be able to switch the sort order of the What's New Videos by name oder date.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by Boolah

Just tried the "What's New" menu option and it seems very, very slow. The first time I opened it, it took almost 5 and a half minutes (5:29 to be exact) to list available videos. I had a spinning circle while I was waiting. The SageTV server wasn't doing anything else at the time. Once the videos were listed, I went back to the main menu and immediately went back into the "What's New" menu and this time it only took 3 minutes (exactly 180 seconds). I had the "Maximum Items to Fetch" value set to 100 with these two attempts. I changed it to its minimum value of 50 and went back into "What's New". This time it only took 2:29.

My SageTV server is an i7-4770K with 32GB of RAM and only runs SageTV (v7.1.9.256) and Plex on Windows 7. I also have 19 favorite YouTube channels in Sage and I'm on a symmetric 75 Mbps fiber connection. Let me know if you need any other info with my setup.

One other thing I noticed is that a lot of the videos I'd mostly watched still showed up in the "What's New" listing. The watched bar on the videos showed >90%, but there was no watched checkmark on the video. Perhaps you could add an option to allow us to choose if a video is >x% watched it's automatically marked as watched.

I am aware of the slowness and there isn't much I can do about it The more favorites you have the slower it gets. There is a lot of work to do to get the unwatched favorites; for every favorite channel I need to get all of the videos and then scan them all to find the unwatched ones.

Your CPU and internet speed is not the limiting factor, the YouTube website is. Once I send it a request I am at their mercy to give me the information quickly. I have implemented a lot of caching and will look into doing more to speed things up.

You can make the wait more tolerable by setting "Maximum New Videos to Display" to a smaller number. (I use 5.)

I am in the process of adding "wait" dialogs which will prevent the UI from becoming unresponsive. I know this isn't a solution, but it's an improvement. I think the better solution is to figure out how YouTube tracks "what's new" for a logged in user. (This is one of the reason's I implemented the log on feature.) So far I haven't been able to figure out how the YouTube website gets the information. I am pretty sure they are using APIs that are not released publicly. I need to find somebody to look at the HTML and JavaScript the website uses so I can reverse engineer things.

As for the Watched status, what you suggest is a good idea. Right now it's considered Watched if you are within 5 seconds of the end. You can always use the "Set all Watched" feature in the options dialog.

[starfire]

I notice the progress bar stops progressing if you come out of a full screen mode and back to the video playing top right while browsing about, so you can watch it like this to the end but it also never then gets flagged as watched.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by starfire

I notice the progress bar stops progressing if you come out of a full screen mode and back to the video playing top right while browsing about, so you can watch it like this to the end but it also never then gets flagged as watched.

Sounds like a bug. I'll look into it. Thanks.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by wubdich

The "Whats's new feature" in beta version 0.12 is great - just needs some speed improvement as Boolah mentioned. The icing on the cake would be to be able to switch the sort order of the What's New Videos by name oder date.

I worked on the speed issue this weekend and made some good progress. The next version will be faster.

The sort order thing won't be too hard to implement but it can be done in several ways. Let's assume there are 10 unwatched videos and the user has the "max to display" set to 5 and sort order set to "name". Should the function return:
- the 5 newest videos sorted by name. (This would be my preference.)
- 5 of the 10 unwatched videos sorted by name (implies they are not sorted in any particular date order.)

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

Once I send it a request I am at their mercy to give me the information quickly.

Have you considered doing the checks in the background on a periodic basis, rather than only when someone accesses the menu (the weather is handled that way by Sage, I guess the EPG data is too)?

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by Tiki

Have you considered doing the checks in the background on a periodic basis, rather than only when someone accesses the menu (the weather is handled that way by Sage, I guess the EPG data is too)?

Yes, but that will take a lot more work

[Fuzzy]

The other option, is making multiple requests simultaneously to youtube.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by starfire

I notice the progress bar stops progressing if you come out of a full screen mode and back to the video playing top right while browsing about, so you can watch it like this to the end but it also never then gets flagged as watched.

Good news, I know why this is happening. Bad news, it will be difficult to fix

[tmiranda]

Beta version 0.13 is now available. Changelog:

• Added option to display more videos from the channel if not specifically browsing a Channel.
• Added wait dialogs to avoid the spinning circle.
• Added "Recommended for You" to the main menu. (User must be logged in.)
• Added option to browse related videos.
• Added option to change the region (country).
• If user selects "Display Videos" for a Channel that does not have any Videos, then display the Playlists instead.
• Removed unused "Display Favorites from Account" option.
• Improved YouTube response error handling.
• Improved speed of "What's New".
• Fixed a bug in "What's New" that would cause an error if the channel title was less than 10 characters long.

The "What's New" is faster, but still no speed demon. I have some more ideas to speed it up and will be working on that.

I think "Recommended for You" is cool. I finally figured out how to get that info from the API

There are two known bugs at this point:

1. The watched info is not tracked if the video is playing in a preview window.
2. Playback will fail if the YouTube video ID starts with a hyphen.

Still on the drawing board:

1. A way to create Favorites by specifying a keyword.
2. Make "Best of YouTube" more prominent. Right now it's buried in "Browse Featured Channels".

As usual, let me know if you have suggestions or comments.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

Good news, I know why this is happening. Bad news, it will be difficult to fix

I sorted this out and it will be fixed in the next release.

[wubdich]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

Beta version 0.13 is now available. Changelog
[..] Improved speed of "What's New". [..]

Speed of "What's New" is improved significantly - good work !

[tmiranda]

Beta version 0.14 is now ready. Changelog:

• Added "Best of YouTube" to the main menu.
• Rearranged the main menu order.
• Added advanced option to specify how far from the end of the video (in seconds) is considered "watched".
• Added "Favorite by Keyword".
• What's New now honors the sort order preference of "When Listing Favorite Channels".
• Added option to control he listing order of Videos in What's New.
• Fixed a bug that would keep the "delete downloaded" option available on the options menu after the file had been deleted.
• Fixed a bug that would prevent videos with a video ID starting with a hyphen to be played (or downloaded).
• Fixed a bug that would prevent watched time from being updated if video was playing in preview window or background.
• Fixed a bug that would cause return to wrong menu if video was playing in preview window stop was pressed.

Right now you can't setup the keyword favorites to automatically record and they will not show up in "What's New", that will be in the next release. This is the last functionality I plan on adding before releasing the plugin as "version 1.0".

If you have any additional functionality you would like to see let me know. I'm trying to wrap this up so I can spend more time on the open source project

Enjoy.

[Gaurav]

Tom, thanks for adding the Keyword favorites. When you add the recording functionality, please see if you can include the ability to limit the recordings by duration (record all videos that contain "XYZ" in the title and are at least X mins long).

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by Gaurav

Tom, thanks for adding the Keyword favorites. When you add the recording functionality, please see if you can include the ability to limit the recordings by duration (record all videos that contain "XYZ" in the title and are at least X mins long).

Will do. It will use the same recording logic as currently exists.

[pjpjpjpj]

Is it possible to do "keep at most" or "keep for XX days" type functions? I have some favorites youtube channels that add a lot of new videos daily, and I would like to have them auto-download so they are there when I want to watch, but I don't have time to watch them daily (or even more than maybe once a week) and I am okay with the older ones being deleted even if they've never been watched, rather than have large amounts of hard drive space being taken.

(I apologize if this is already in the plugin and I just don't know about it - I admit I haven't had a lot of time to play with it!)

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

Is it possible to do "keep at most" or "keep for XX days" type functions? I have some favorites youtube channels that add a lot of new videos daily, and I would like to have them auto-download so they are there when I want to watch, but I don't have time to watch them daily (or even more than maybe once a week) and I am okay with the older ones being deleted even if they've never been watched, rather than have large amounts of hard drive space being taken.

(I apologize if this is already in the plugin and I just don't know about it - I admit I haven't had a lot of time to play with it!)

I've thought about adding this. I'll try to get it in.

[toony]

Thanks Tmiranda ! This is great.

Is there any chance a History option can be added?

Cheers