Watch history
Every time you play something, Cardinal Cinema records it against your account on your Media Server. That record is what makes resume, Continue Watching and Next Up work, and it is what the History page lists.
History is per user and stays on your own server. Nothing about what you watch leaves it.
What is recorded
One entry is created each time you start playing something. Playing the same episode again tomorrow adds a second entry rather than overwriting the first, so History is a log of viewings and not a list of titles.
Each entry holds your position in the video and how far through it you are, expressed as a fraction from 0 to 1.
When progress is saved
| Moment | What happens |
|---|---|
| Every 10 seconds of playback | Your position is sent to the server |
| Pausing, seeking, or closing the player | Your position is sent immediately |
A ten-second interval is the worst case for how much of a viewing can be lost if a browser is closed abruptly or a laptop's lid comes down.
Because the position lives on the server rather than in the browser, resume works across devices: stop a film on a laptop, open Cinema on a TV, and it offers to continue from the same second.
Watched
Something counts as watched once you reach 90% of its duration. That is deliberately short of the end: credits, post-credit scenes and a trailing few seconds are not something you should have to sit through to have a film marked off.
Once an item passes 90% it stays watched. Playing it again does not un-watch it.
Anything past 99.1% is treated as having been played all the way through.
Continue Watching
Continue Watching, on the Watch Now page, lists everything you have started and not finished — most recently watched first.
An item appears there when both of these are true:
- You watched at least 60 seconds of it.
- It has not reached the 90% watched mark.
The one-minute floor keeps the shelf honest. Opening something, watching thirty seconds and deciding against it does not fill your home page with it.
Finishing an item removes it from the shelf.
Next Up
Next Up suggests the next episode of shows you are in the middle of. For each show where you have finished at least one episode, it offers the first unwatched episode that comes after the furthest one you finished, ordered by season and then episode number. Shows are listed with whatever you finished most recently at the front.
Two details worth knowing:
- Specials are skipped. Season 0 never becomes your next episode, because a Christmas special is rarely what you meant by "next".
- A file covering two episodes counts as both. Finishing
S01E05-E06puts you at episode 7.
Starting from Next Up queues the rest of the season behind the episode you pick, so a night of episodes keeps going without you.
Watch Now shelves are live
Continue Watching, Next Up and the recently-added shelves are worked out from your history the moment you open the page. They are not picks stored in advance, and they are not shared between users on the server.
This means they react immediately: finish an episode and the shelf has moved on by the time you are back at Watch Now. It also means two people on the same server see entirely different shelves in front of the same library.
Deleting history
Entries can be deleted from the History page. Deleting an entry removes that viewing, and with it any resume position it carried, so a title that was in Continue Watching leaves the shelf.
Deleting history does not touch your files, your ratings, or anything else about the movie or show.
History survives re-indexing
De-indexing a file and indexing it again gives the server a new record of the file, but your history stays attached to the movie or episode itself. Reorganizing your folders does not cost you your Continue Watching shelf.
Required capabilities
| Capability | Required for |
|---|---|
CinemaHistory.Create | Recording what you watch, which is what resume depends on |
CinemaHistory.Read | The History page, Continue Watching and Next Up |
CinemaHistory.Delete | Deleting entries |
A user without CinemaHistory.Create can watch, but nothing is remembered between sessions. See Role-Based Access Control.
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