Resume Function
Posted: Fri May 17, 2013 6:57 pm
Hi,
As some may have noticed we've added a "Resume Function" to UMS. The short story on resume can be found in the tool-tip in the GUI. Here I'll lay out the words a bit more.
First of all what is resume? Resume means that if you haven't watched the WHOLE video (currently only implemented for video) you can come back and resume your viewing from where you left at a later time. This means that if you stop viewing after 2 hours of that 4 hour marathon movie you can pick up viewing and don't need to see the first 2 hours again.
So how does this works in UMS?
First there is (as always) a "on/off" switch for the feature. If you set it to off UMS will not do any resume handling.
When a video stops UMS will look if the WHOLE video has been played. If it has nothing more happens. If the WHOLE video hasn't been played UMS will note how long into the video you've watched store this information on disc (which means that it survives restarts of UMS/the computer) and create IN THE SAME folder an entry with the same name prepended with "Resume: ". Now you'll have two entries in the folder which are the same video. The resume entry which will start from your resume point and the "regular" one which will start from the beginning again. An important note here is that there can only be one resume entry (per video) at a given time. If you start playing the "regular/original" video from start again it will overwrite/update any old resume that exists.
If you look at the video via the resume entry and you watch the WHOLE video the resume entry is removed, if you didn't watch the WHOLE video the resume entry is updated.
IN THE SAME folder means exactly that. You must follow the exact same path to get the resume. For file based videos this is normally no big issue but for web based it can be. If you place the exact same video in two different web folders you can only get resume from the folder where you did the first play.
Now to some real gory tech details.
What is the WHOLE video? A movie that is 1.54h is of course played once all 1 hours and 54 minutes has passed or? Now we work with computers here and we will not get that exact timeing. A movie might be reported to be 1.54.00 but the render stops playing at 1.53.45 thus skipping the last 15 secs. To account for this UMS consider the whole movie to be played if a percent factor of the expected movie was played. By default it is 92% but you can configure it to other values (set "resume_back=x" where x is the %).
Since timers of stop/start are not 100% correct UMS will "rewind" the stop time a little bit to make sure you don't miss anything. By default this rewind time is 17 seconds which means you' see the last 10-15 seconds one more time. This time can be modified as well (set "resume_rewind" to desired time). Finally to avoid videos that crashed or was unplayable etc. the video must play at least a "long enough" time. By default it is 10 secs (configurable "min_playtime", "min_playtime_file","min_playtime_web").
Resume is a generic option and should work regardless of how the media entry is added to the UMS (be it disc,web,plugin or whatever). However some type of videos are by there nature not resumeable (like live streams) or the media might not support timeseeking and for those resueme of course doesn't work.
This is a new feature and even though we've tested it quite much there might be things that doesn't work as expected so pls help us with bugs. Don't forget to upload full logs...
As some may have noticed we've added a "Resume Function" to UMS. The short story on resume can be found in the tool-tip in the GUI. Here I'll lay out the words a bit more.
First of all what is resume? Resume means that if you haven't watched the WHOLE video (currently only implemented for video) you can come back and resume your viewing from where you left at a later time. This means that if you stop viewing after 2 hours of that 4 hour marathon movie you can pick up viewing and don't need to see the first 2 hours again.
So how does this works in UMS?
First there is (as always) a "on/off" switch for the feature. If you set it to off UMS will not do any resume handling.
When a video stops UMS will look if the WHOLE video has been played. If it has nothing more happens. If the WHOLE video hasn't been played UMS will note how long into the video you've watched store this information on disc (which means that it survives restarts of UMS/the computer) and create IN THE SAME folder an entry with the same name prepended with "Resume: ". Now you'll have two entries in the folder which are the same video. The resume entry which will start from your resume point and the "regular" one which will start from the beginning again. An important note here is that there can only be one resume entry (per video) at a given time. If you start playing the "regular/original" video from start again it will overwrite/update any old resume that exists.
If you look at the video via the resume entry and you watch the WHOLE video the resume entry is removed, if you didn't watch the WHOLE video the resume entry is updated.
IN THE SAME folder means exactly that. You must follow the exact same path to get the resume. For file based videos this is normally no big issue but for web based it can be. If you place the exact same video in two different web folders you can only get resume from the folder where you did the first play.
Now to some real gory tech details.
What is the WHOLE video? A movie that is 1.54h is of course played once all 1 hours and 54 minutes has passed or? Now we work with computers here and we will not get that exact timeing. A movie might be reported to be 1.54.00 but the render stops playing at 1.53.45 thus skipping the last 15 secs. To account for this UMS consider the whole movie to be played if a percent factor of the expected movie was played. By default it is 92% but you can configure it to other values (set "resume_back=x" where x is the %).
Since timers of stop/start are not 100% correct UMS will "rewind" the stop time a little bit to make sure you don't miss anything. By default this rewind time is 17 seconds which means you' see the last 10-15 seconds one more time. This time can be modified as well (set "resume_rewind" to desired time). Finally to avoid videos that crashed or was unplayable etc. the video must play at least a "long enough" time. By default it is 10 secs (configurable "min_playtime", "min_playtime_file","min_playtime_web").
Resume is a generic option and should work regardless of how the media entry is added to the UMS (be it disc,web,plugin or whatever). However some type of videos are by there nature not resumeable (like live streams) or the media might not support timeseeking and for those resueme of course doesn't work.
This is a new feature and even though we've tested it quite much there might be things that doesn't work as expected so pls help us with bugs. Don't forget to upload full logs...