Play Counts and synching plays to Youtube if logged in

[GlassedSilver]

Hey, sorry that I'm just slowly starting to get back to the thinking train, but life has changed a lot in the past weeks and I cannot complain about it. I digress though. :)

Here's, for trackability, a little request of mine:

1. Can we save play positions and start counting the plays relatively soon? I'd love to move to watching content on YTDL-M fairly soon and play counts would make that more rewarding. (which would also eventually allow for "hide unwatched" and similar smarter sorting shenanigans. :)
2. Another idea would be to sync the play position or whether a Youtube video has been played at least to Youtube. If you stop watching on YT you stop training their algo on you. Many may love exactly that, but personally I like to make an educated decision of feeding YT this data for better recommendations, which I do like a lot of the time. This would obviously be an optional feature. Maybe streaming-only content could be, again with opt-in, a good place to try this out first.

Cheers!

Edit: Issue number #222, huh? Schnapszahl! :D

[GlassedSilver]

Hmm, I do wonder, if this is still on track for 4.2, wouldn't it make sense to add this issue to the respective project for that release?

Or did anything change about this? Cheers! :)

[Tzahi12345]

This is still planned, but not the synching part to YouTube views. That is kind of in the works, but it may have to wait until v4.3, which is why I'm kinda hesitant to add it to the project.

[GlassedSilver]

This is still planned, but not the synching part to YouTube views. That is kind of in the works, but it may have to wait until v4.3, which is why I'm kinda hesitant to add it to the project.

Not sure if you saw this, but going through the yt-dlp docs (not sure if this also exists in other forks or the OG) there is this arg available:

--mark-watched Mark videos watched (YouTube only)

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#general-options

Pretty nifty. Now this should obviously not happen at download-time as this flag may suggest its usage, since we provide the media management and playing experience as well for us it's a function we want to pass either on demand or when being idk... 90% through with a video in the player. :)

It's not an increase of plays I think for YT, but it could be an option. Unless you thought of something else? (not an urgent feature though)

[GlassedSilver]

Reminder to myself to come up with a concept how this can technically work in the backend, because when we implement play count synching, we need to store plays in various ways and CALCULATE the total number of plays (per user) based on those multiple values.

That way we'll be able to multi-way synch play counts.

One of the key aspects in getting your past YT plays into YTDL-M (bringing along your play counts from YT) could - and I need to check if that is something we can find there - be the good old Google Data Takeout. (all hail GDPR)

YTDL-M would then become your one master source for seeing play counts. Google Data Takeout being an irregular, but better than nothing - and most importantly - data call serving way to ingress that data. Again, if play counts are in the takeout. I'll investigate this.