FilmFS

A FUSE filesystem that tracks video file viewings and logs them to a SQLite database. I built it to learn more about SQLite as well as filesystems and how they interact with userspace applications.

Tech Stack

Features

• Allows read-only access to video files in configured library path within mountpoint
• Logs film title, times watched, and last watched timestamp in ~/.filmfs/films.db
• Inspect logs with Qt-based GUI watchlistViewer

Challenges & Solutions

I learned that media players often perform multiple read operations during a single viewing of a file. If each read were logged independently, the watch count would be incremented multiple times per viewing. To address this, I stored the PID of the last read operation in a static variable initialized to -1 (since valid PIDs are non-negative). New reads are only logged if the current PID is not the same as the last one.

Testing

Lessons Learned

While I already knew some basic SQL from a course I'd taken centered around Chuck Easttom's Network Defense And Countermeasures, this project taught me a lot about the basics of working with databases programmatically via SQLite.

This project deepened my knowledge of the POSIX filesystem API, but was not quite as challenging as I would have liked.

Future Plans

While FUSE abstracts much of the complexity of filesystem development, I plan to challenge myself by writing a kernel-level filesystem in the future to gain a more complete understanding of low-level I/O operations.

Further Reading

• FUSE
• SQLite Documentation