[-Dis]

@Dumyat Yep favourites continue to work. You just need to re-add them after update.

Basically if you have added videos to favourites url previously was "plugin://plugin.video.discoveryplus/?action=play&video_id=xxxxxx&video_type=EPISODE" and after update it is "plugin://plugin.video.discoveryplus/play/xxxxxx?video_type=EPISODE" or "plugin://plugin.video.discoveryplus/play/EPISODE/xxxxxx". I haven't made final decision of play url. Also if you have added for example My List to Kodi favourites url for that is also changed.

[Atreyu]

This could be interesting:
https://www.fiercevideo.com/video/discov...ter-merger

[kevwag]

This could be interesting:
https://www.fiercevideo.com/video/discov...ter-merger

The Discovery / Warner HBO merger has been public knowledge for over a year. Rumours of bundling may be true but will only be valid for certain regions, at least for a while.
In the UK and Europe for example, HBO & Warner have existing contracts with Sky broadcasting and HBO have already stated that they won't (in other words, they legally can't) offer their own streaming service in any of Sky's territories until those contracts expire in 2025. It is for similar reasons that in the USA, Discovery+ does not offer live streams of the channels provided by Discovery Networks - Discovery built itself to where it is now thanks to long-term contracts with US cable operators and those contracts have air-tight non-compete clauses.

[Atreyu]

I didn't know anything about their strategies. Thanks for the info.

[kevwag]

I didn't know anything about their strategies. Thanks for the info.

It's more about contractual obligations and legal restrictions than strategy. In fact it could be seen as extremely bad strategy on the part of the networks & content owners to have locked the door on their own progress.

My take (just an educated guess and not based on any official released info) is that the content providers signed long-term contracts before anyone envisaged streaming services coming along and quickly overthrowing the long-established norm where cable and satellite broadcasting were the dominant distribution medium. With the assumption that those mediums would continue to dominate, it made perfect sense for any TV network to secure as long-term a contract as possible with the cable & satellite operators. It secured their long-term existence and growth - if your TV network has no way of reaching your customers then you don't have a TV network!
The internet has come a really long way in no time at all. No-one really saw it coming and it's got the now obsolete cable & satellite operators fighting to stay alive. The long-term contracts they have are the only real thing keeping them alive in their current form. They will probably prevail, moving their TV services onto their own internet streaming sites but no-longer having a monopoly, they will have to settle for far less lucrative deals when it's time to renegotiate contracts and any chance of exclusivity gone forever.

The Discovery / Warner HBO merger will create the world's second largest media company, second only to Disney - That will give them huge amounts of leverage at the negotiating table!

[kevwag]

Hey Dis,
Thank you for adding the "Mark season watched/unwatched" feature - it works perfectly and has already helped me get a long way towards restoring the watched status of my shows!
I noticed that the Tick (watched) icon does not appear next to seasons where all episodes have been watched, would that be difficult to add? It's not massively important but it would be a nice finishing touch making it really easy to visualise your viewing progress and spot any seasons where you've missed an episode or two.

Once again, thank you for listening & responding to what us users want, and for your continued hard work maintaining and updating your add-on. You respond to users, react to changes and iron-out bugs quicker than any other addon developer (except Matt / SlyGuy who is also exceptional).

In my opinion, Discovery+ is one of the very best add-ons currently available for Kodi. You should submit it for inclusion in the official Kodi repo - it's way better than many that are already in there!

[-Dis]

I noticed that the Tick (watched) icon does not appear next to seasons where all episodes have been watched, would that be difficult to add? It's not massively important but it would be a nice finishing touch making it really easy to visualise your viewing progress and spot any seasons where you've missed an episode or two.

I have to check if that feature is possible to do without impacting add-on performance when loading seasons page.
It would require loading content of all seasons when loading seasons page and checking how many episodes season have and how many are watched and that can slow down when going to all seasons listing.
Yep I agree it would be nice finishing touch.
 

In my opinion, Discovery+ is one of the very best add-ons currently available for Kodi. You should submit it for inclusion in the official Kodi repo - it's way better than many that are already in there!

I have to check what is the process to get add-on to official Kodi repo. But for now add-on will stay in my repo.

Thanks for your nice comments

[kevwag]

...It would require loading content of all seasons when loading seasons page and checking how many episodes season have and how many are watched and that can slow down when going to all seasons listing.

Maybe the solution would be to just load the season watched status once from the D+ site and then store it locally for subsequent visits to that show's page...
OR...
An option in the "views" section of the settings menu to turn season markers on or off. That way the user has the option to turn the markers off if they slow things down too much.

But, TBH, having said all that...
Thinking about this logically, it's only going to be a true/false argument for each episode - 1 bit of data... so...
A whole season's status might use a couple of bytes, three at the most...
If downloading that is slowing anyone down then they've got no chance of actually streaming the content!
Alphanumeric metadata loads pretty much instantly when browsing anywhere in the addon, it's only the thumbnails that lag behind. I'd say that's a fairly reliable indication that a couple more bytes wouldn't make a noticeable difference.

[-Dis]

@kevwag 
D+ doesn't offer data of which seasons are watched. Add-on have to load every season and calculate watched and total videos.

Even file size per season is not greater than something like 300 kilobytes processing all videos per season takes some time. Example Gold Rush has 12 seasons and about 20 episodes per season. I tested that loading Gold Rush season listing takes about 5 seconds to load with it enabled and almost instant without it.
But maybe adding setting for it would be good way to deal with this situation.

I still try to found way make it little bit faster.

I just couple days ago was investigating why images takes so much time to load. Add-on uses full quality artwork and images are about 2 Mb each. Website uses lower quality images which are about 80 kilobytes. I am not ready to sacrifice that much quality. For some currently unknown reason I can't get different qualities to work in add-on.

[kevwag]

@kevwag 
D+ doesn't offer data of which seasons are watched. Add-on have to load every season and calculate watched and total videos.

Even file size per season is not greater than something like 300 kilobytes processing all videos per season takes some time. Example Gold Rush has 12 seasons and about 20 episodes per season. I tested that loading Gold Rush season listing takes about 5 seconds to load with it enabled and almost instant without it.
But maybe adding setting for it would be good way to deal with this situation.

I still try to found way make it little bit faster.

I just couple days ago was investigating why images takes so much time to load. Add-on uses full quality artwork and images are about 2 Mb each. Website uses lower quality images which are about 80 kilobytes. I am not ready to sacrifice that much quality. For some currently unknown reason I can't get different qualities to work in add-on.

I'm happy to wait 5 seconds tbh, especially while I'm still working my way through all the stuff discovery decided to "un-watch" for me - 5 seconds on the main page for a show is quicker than opening each season to see which ones I've already updated. Like you said, it takes a lot longer for the thumbnails to load anyway so the watched markers will still arrive before the rest of the page has finished loading.

If my Kodi experience is typical of most users, we've probably all got used to the busy-spinner regularly indicating mysterious delays where nothing is actually happening. In fact, "nothing" can sometimes take a couple of minutes to not happen before the spinner disappears and you're back in control! I'm guessing that Kodi must be written like old-school pre-DOS software that can't multi-task and has to wait for every execution to complete before it can start another.
Some things lock you out for silly amounts of time and it rarely makes any sense as to why. Setting an episode as watched on Trakt can take 30 seconds or longer, some add-ons are much slower at this than others despite the task being identical! All it's doing is sending an http request and receiving an acknowledgement - I can't think of any good reason why the user needs to be prevented from browsing menus or doing something else while it's waiting for the response.

You would understand more about this than me - is there a valid reason for these "busy" lockouts or is it just sloppy coding from some add-on devs? I've noticed that in your add-on, I can continue to browse through menus and shows, even when most of the thumbnails haven't loaded yet - it doesn't lock me out waiting for the images to load. Is it possible maybe, to handle getting the season watched status in the same way as the images so that it doesn't actually delay anything else while it updates?

[kevwag]

...On a completely different subject, I've noticed a minor glitch lately, I'm not sure if it's actually a bug in the addon or if it's caused by something else:
When the show I'm watching finishes, I don't get returned to the menu page, instead, the timeline clock continues counting beyond the actual length of the show (eg: 45:42 / 43:40). If I press the right arrow (forward step) button momentarily, this will then end the playback and return me to the menu page. Something else happens which I think might be related is that from the "Continue watching" menu, if I select "Resume from xx:xx:xx", playback fails - the play indicator shows for a brief moment and then disappears. The option to restart from the beginning works fine.

Neither of these things is a huge problem, they're easily worked-around, I'm just bringing them to your attention in case it's relevant to you in some way (although I think there's a chance that it might even be caused by another addon such as "Un-pause Jump-back" interfering with the player transport).

[kevwag]

Hey Dis
Love the season watched markers feature. Works great and it really doesn't take that long to load, even with big shows like Gold Rush.
I noticed that when I watched the one remaining episode of the current season, when I went back to the seasons page, the markers didn't refresh so the season wasn't marked as watched. I had to exit the show and open it again to refresh the page. Is that fixable?
I've noticed that some addons have a setting "When playback ends, force container refresh" which is enabled by default and the watched status in those addons works well.

Still on the subject of watched markers, I tried the "Toggle watched status on Trakt" item from the context menu yesterday but it failed with an error. I think this menu item comes from Kodi's Trakt addon so it's not your problem to fix but I was wondering if you had considered maybe integrating Trakt functionality into the addon at some point in the future?

[-Dis]

Love the season watched markers feature. Works great and it really doesn't take that long to load, even with big shows like Gold Rush.
I noticed that when I watched the one remaining episode of the current season, when I went back to the seasons page, the markers didn't refresh so the season wasn't marked as watched. I had to exit the show and open it again to refresh the page. Is that fixable?
I've noticed that some addons have a setting "When playback ends, force container refresh" which is enabled by default and the watched status in those addons works well.

Container refresh is already used in episodes listing when playback ends or stops. I tried to add it to seasons page but that doesn't help. My guess is that Kodi is using some sort of cache when going back to previous page.

Edit. I found way to fix this. Fix is not to use cache (cacheToDisc=False) on season folders. I will implement that to next version.

Still on the subject of watched markers, I tried the "Toggle watched status on Trakt" item from the context menu yesterday but it failed with an error. I think this menu item comes from Kodi's Trakt addon so it's not your problem to fix but I was wondering if you had considered maybe integrating Trakt functionality into the addon at some point in the future?

I have not used Trakt and I doesn't know if is it even intended to work with add-ons. Can you post error message or log?

[kevwag]

I have not used Trakt and I doesn't know if is it even intended to work with add-ons. Can you post error message or log?

The standalone Trakt addon (In the Official Kodi repo under Programs) is entirely intended to work with addons. It has no media content of its own
so, its sole purpose is to keep track of what you watch using other addons - it has no other function. Some addons have their own built-in Trakt functionality which is usually more comprehensive than the standalone Trakt addon (supporting user lists & collections etc). Maybe the reason the devs of those addons chose to implement their own Trakt version was something to do with the standalone version not working properly, I don't know.

I'll try and post a log tomorrow when I get chance - I'm off to sleep now

[patrik.ekstrom]

Subtitles won't work, it shows that they are available and thats its on, but no subs on screen.
I'm using the swedish site.

Do you need logs?

Thanks