Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[TimothyJB]

Hi,

I tried searching and could not find what I was looking for.
I'm new to JRiver (VERY new) - only recently downloaded a trial copy.
So far I think it's amazing as a way of managing and viewing all my media, however there's one thing I can't seem to do and that's only download podcasts on a certain schedule, i.e. 2am-5am.
It's quite important in my current set-up that downloads be scheduled as I'll be downloading a large number of large podcasts and can't let the podcast downloads run wild on the shared bandwidth.
I could of course set it to be completely manual downloads, but that would require me always being there at (for example) 2am to start the downloads, which is for obvious reasons impractical.

Has anyone got a solution to my issue  ?

Thanks.

[Lasse_Lus]

no podcast scheduling is possible, but you can send "on and off" via commandline, check dev zone on interact

[TimothyJB]

no podcast scheduling is possible, but you can send "on and off" via commandline, check dev zone on interact

What command are you referring to by "on and off"?
Can't see anything related to podcast downloads here: http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/The_Command_Line

[Lasse_Lus]

you can send MCC commands http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Media_Center_Core_Commands

i'm refering to MCC 21021 and 22

[TimothyJB]

you can send MCC commands http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Media_Center_Core_Commands

i'm refering to MCC 21021 and 22

Perfect thanks. So I guess I just need to start looking at automating sending those commands on a schedule. Gonna go get some sleep tonight, but tomorrow I will start looking into these command protocols. Thanks very much.

Edit: Looks like it should be fairly easy to automate using batch scripts and windows scheduler, will look better later.

[Lasse_Lus]

MC also has a scheduler, look under services & plugins

[TimothyJB]

MC also has a scheduler, look under services & plugins

Thanks, will do 

[TimothyJB]

So I've played around with it a bit and think I got it working perfectly.

The only issue is that because the second command just disables auto download and doesn't actually cancel any downloads in progress, if a download is unfinished when the second command is issued , it will continue to finish downloading after the second command has been issued for however long it takes rather than cancel it. A command for cancelling any podcasts currentley downloading would be nice to issue straight after the disable auto download, but I didn't find any command like that so can't do it, unless someone wants to prove me wrong? 

I thought I was going to run into an issue of all downloads queuing up together and then if it doesn't finish all of those queued up before the second command it would continue to download all of them, however by the looks of it, it only queues up a certain number at a time (dictated by option: "Allow up to X  simultaneous downloads"), so if X is set to 2, then there can only ever be 2 downloads running in the queue when the second command is issued, therefore only ever 2 downloads to finish after auto downloading disabled, if there are others that would have been downloaded after those 2, they will not start at all (good)

I ran it in a small test and seemed to work out fine, but after tonight (technically tomorrow morning) I will know for sure if it works out the way I want.

Here are screenshots of my settings for anyone interested.

Enable Podcast Auto Download Scheduled Task


Disable Podcast Auto Download Scheduled Task


Tools>Options>Podcast


I've set "Allow up to X  simultaneous downloads" to 2 and "Check for new episodes every Y minutes" to 30. I don't want it going out looking for podcasts too often because most of the day it would be a waste, but leaving it too long (in my case 60 minutes - the default) would mean that if a podcast goes up just after the enable auto download command is issued, then it wouldn't check again until after disable auto download (because my period between enable and download is only 60 minutes). At first I started looking if there was a way to disable that auto-checking and schedule it through the command line to do it just right before and during the downloading period, but I changed my mind (and don't know if it's possible) because sometimes I do occasionally stream a podcast in the middle of the day if it's important and not yet downloaded, so nice to know it's ready without starting downloads.

Will write back tomorrow to confirm there were no issues with my set-up.

I'm pretty picky about my podcasts and bandwidth management as you can probably tell, but I think I've made Media Center work for my needs,
Thanks for the help