Can VLC tell me how much time I spend on it every day?

[lovedj1]

Hi.

I would like to know if there's a way to find out how much time I spend each day watching TV or movies, and since everything I watch I watch using VLC, I was wondering if there's a way to find this out in VLC. I think I'm spending way too much time on it and would like to accurately track it.

Thanks

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

So far, no. But I have a proejct for this.

[lovedj1]

Ok. Many thanks for taking the time to reply. I think it would be a great feature to add so we can monitor how much time we spend watching TV.

[lovedj1]

Yes, thank you for that. But that is only good if you watch the whole file, as it only tells you how long each file is. What I would ideally need would be for VLC to be able to show me exactly ho much time I have spent using it (i.e., watching TV shows, documentaries or movies). Some times I don't watch the whole thing. And also, it would be great to have a total amount per day (or up to the moment when you check).

[TheJjokerR]

This sounds very doable, though only interesting for only a few people. Not really worth a new feature for everyone imo.

This should be quite easily done in an extension though. I have no experience with VLC extensions, though I downloaded an example one and it's just a bunch of Lua files. You can write your own bit of code to record the time using: https://www.lua.org/pil/22.1.html and you can write that data to a file with https://www.lua.org/pil/21.1.html
Upon requesting the time read you could read the file using the same functions and do the math on how much is used. In order to store the time you could use your own format or something like JSON to note the different times of use, perhaps with a category and filename.

I realize I'm asking you to learn Lua and just make your own extensions... Though that is a good idea! Learn Lua, make your own extension and learn a skill which is going to be and already is very useful