OffHour and VCR

Sometimes when you wan't to see that very cool movie just to find out that the network speed is close to zero and the movie is skipping back and forth or the sound is sounding like Donald Duck? Then offhour is something for you. Offhour mode will download the movie (or wahtever media it is) at some other time and allow you to view it from your own hard disc later not beeing subjected to the rest of the worlds network usage. The name offhour comes from the fact that this download should occur when you are "offline" maybe during night or at work.

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Configuring offhour

To enable offhour you add channels.offhour=<xxx> and you must have save enabled to your PMS.conf. <xxx> should be replaced with a line of the following format: time,duartion,max thread. The time is the time of day that you are "off". It should be given on the format HH:MM. The other parameters duartion and max thread are both optional.

Useage

When you've enabled offhour each media will (in addition to "SAVE&PLAY" and "PLAY") have an extra entry called "ADD to offhour" if you select this the media will be added to the offhour database. Once the time of day becomes your configured offhour time Channels will start downloading all the media you've added to your offhour database. The max_thread parameter is the number of downloads you'll start running at the same time. When one download is complete a new one will start. To avoid downloading all day long the duration parameter stops this starting of new downloads after the configured number of minutes. The downloaded media will end up in your saved directory.

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VCR

A similar function is the VCR function. The VCR function turns your super mordern computer with zillions of core into a simple VCR. When enabled Channels will download media at a given date and time and store them on your hard disc.

Useage

To enable the VCR place a file in your channels directory that has a suffix of .vcr (for example "myvcr.vcr"). In this file add lines of the format: date and time,url The date and time must be a full date and time yyyy-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS and the url is the url you wan't to download. Just as with offhour your downloaded media will end up in the save directory.