MediaPlayer record playcount in attribute

[xray7224]

It would be really good if a playcount attribute could exist for media files and then for media (audio or video) played in MediaPlayer could then increment the playcount.

The playcount probably wants to check you've watched/listened to 50% or 75% (some reasnable value) prior to incrementing it but it also wants to make sure you're just not seeking ahead and that you've actually watched/listened.

[korli]

This doesn't make much sense to have such an attribute: its meaning would have to be per user, which a file system attribute can't provide. Moreover what happens if the music played is on a read-only media? Usually media players have user "libraries" which also handle statistics for each song. That should be also the case for MediaPlayer (probably not for streams though).

[xray7224]

Those are valid concerns however I'd argue it does make a lot of sense.

The main reason for wanting it as a file system attribute is that it'd let you easily query using this attribute e.g. a playcount <= 0 would produce unplayed media useful for films or TV programmes one might want to watch. As a file system attribute it'd be visible via the standard BeOS API, the file manager and command line tools allowing the user to show/hide the field, sort by the field, query by the field, etc. The fact this would just be a common attribute stored on the file would mean that any mediaplayer for haiku could use it and changing mediaplayers wouldn't cause you to loose your play count like what happens in most other operating systems.

I agree if you had multiple users who shared the same files it would likely not be ideal (though sometimes perhaps it might). Haiku however is largely a single user operating system and while technically new users can be created and files can be transferred to other systems or even volumes shared, I think the benefit of having it a generic attribute shared across the system and software outweighs the potential problems multi-users might cause. It's similar although granted not the same as the "rating" attribute, while ratings could be useful to other people, I think they'll often be personal to the user and what their tastes are.