Some episodes not deleting

[arkolbus]

From viewtopic.php?f=5&t=852#p4105:

* If we get two 'playing' updates that are passed the duration, update duration to be 20% longer than current location.

If the duration is artificially extended, the episode does not get deleted upon completion. If I do an "Add and Sort" on my playlist and include incomplete episodes, I get about a dozen episodes that are listed as 80-93% listened (due to the artificial extension), but all of these episodes are actually 100% listened. If I start listening at the beginning of the queue, I hear the last half second or so of each podcast. The episode is removed from the playlist, but if I do another add/sort, they show up again in the same state.

[marwatk]

Hmm,

I knew this was going to be an issue, but only on episodes that didn't work properly with the duration. I don't think you were having a problem with it playing past the end, were you?

It may be that some of them are playing maybe 2 or 3 seconds passed the end, which triggers the code to handle bad durations. If a lot of files do that, though, it means I may have an issue. I'll have to add some more smarts there, I guess.

If you notice it happening can you describe what scenario it ends up extending them on your device?

-Marcus

[arkolbus]

I knew this was going to be an issue, but only on episodes that didn't work properly with the duration. I don't think you were having a problem with it playing past the end, were you?

I'm not sure what you mean by "playing past the end" or how I would tell if that's an issue. The episodes seem to end properly. I don't see any errors.

It may be that some of them are playing maybe 2 or 3 seconds passed the end, which triggers the code to handle bad durations. If a lot of files do that, though, it means I may have an issue. I'll have to add some more smarts there, I guess.

If you notice it happening can you describe what scenario it ends up extending them on your device?

Many of these episodes initially reported a very short duration (like 0 sec), so during playback PT has to keep extending the length (although at increasing intervals). This may not be the case for all of the problem episodes, but I noticed it for several.

Is there no way to tell that playback has completed without comparing the reported playback time to the length of the media?

[hunberry]

I am having the same new problem of podcast episodes not deleting in some cases.
For example Mayo Clinic (mayoclinic.org/rss/all-audio-podcast.xml)
When these podcasts end Podtrapper shows 59s played, 8s or 9s remaining (nothing there)
and they don't get deleted.

[marwatk]

Many of these episodes initially reported a very short duration (like 0 sec), so during playback PT has to keep extending the length (although at increasing intervals). This may not be the case for all of the problem episodes, but I noticed it for several.

Ok, so you were seeing duration issues. Basically the issue is that the media player is sometimes really bad at determining the duration of some files. It just reports the duration as some time, X, which may or may not be the actual duration. Sometimes, like with what you're seeing, X is actually much less than the actual duration, and the file plays past X. PodTrapper can see that we're now at position X+1, but the media player still insists the duration is X. The problem is that sometimes X is reported as 10 seconds on a 2 hour file. When that happens, if you stop the podcast and play another and I don't fudge the duration, it will look like it's complete, even if there's an hour left (since I can't know how much is actually left).

Is there no way to tell that playback has completed without comparing the reported playback time to the length of the media?

I do get an "end of media" event when the media has run out, but I get this in a lot of cases that have nothing to do with the end of the media (for example, when you pull the sd card, or it hits a minor corruption, etc etc etc). There are a lot of cases where that happens, pretty much whenever the media is stopped out of my control.

So really it's just a battle of heuristics trying to determine what the real duration is, if you're done listening, etc. The last change I put in was to counter the "Deleted before finished" issue, but I think I overcorrected and now have too much of a "never gets finished" issue. Unfortunately it'll never be perfect, but I have a lot of room to make it smarter than what it is now.

-Marcus

[arkolbus]

I figured that'd be a problem. The main issue is that the episode is removed from the playlist as if it were deleted, but is still on my media card. I'd like to see it deleted so it's not wasting space. Here it would be nice to have the "recently played" or "recently deleted" screen that I requested a few months back. If I notice an episode terminates prematurely, I can go to that screen and mark it for redownload (or save it from deletion, depending on how it's implemented)

[arkolbus]

Problem appears to have been solved. I have not experienced any undeleted episodes since the upgrade. Thanks!

[marwatk]

Great!

It's still not perfect, but basically now when it sees and 'END OF MEDIA' message and we've been faking the duration it resets the duration to the current position. In all other cases an END_OF_MEDIA doesn't affect the duration.

-Marcus