Great first go.
An initial comment: more visual indicators are needed. To clarify, for example, when I go to an episode details, tap more options and select download, I see nothing at all that indicates that the download has started or that the episode is downloaded. I would expect to see that info there.
Additionally, similar to the keep forever treatment, have something similar for downloads.
Some more feedback:
It appears episodes don’t download when the app is in the background. Some kind of notice, possibly using local notifications, would be useful to alert to this fact.
Question: how are downloaded episodes sorted? Will you introduce any kind of basic sorting to the downloads view?
Yes, feedback is planned when tapping download from the menus.
Are you force quitting the app? Downloads do happen in the background if you leave the app.
Downloads are sorted by when they were queued. Collapsing episodes into single show rows is planned.
I just tried the "Download" option and it seems to work perfectly. My only problem is that my iPad doesn't have much storage. The 30 minute program I downloaded took up 2.8gb of storage. Is there any way to reduce the quality and take up less storage?
See this post here:
What if the only access you have is cellular and you never get WiFi?
If I add an external SD drive to my iPad, is there a way to tell Channels to access the external drive for downloads?
Before I try to load this on my iPad this weekend, I have a question.
If I download a recording that was comskipped with Channels DVR, will the markers get downloaded and be available for skipping on my iPad?
Yes, I just tried it with airplane mode on and commercial skipping was still functional.
This is fantastic. I tried TiVo's implementation so many times over the years and it was always so glitchy, slow to transfer, a real pain. I've tested this a bunch just now and it's working great. Those downloads are FAST. Once again, Channels's devs knock it out of the park!
Feature request: the ability to queue up downloads from the webUI? I'm guessing they can't download in the background, but maybe when we next launch the app. Automatically or by confirming the queue? I know this is brand new and we've got a ways to go, just wanted to share the idea.
Future feature request: the ability to set up automated downloads of specific shows. Lots of podcast apps do this and allow you to set limits. They let you keep a fresh cache of updated content, like 1 or 2 of the most recent shows or whatever. Without any of the tapping required every day. The scenario I'm thinking about would make it great for a daily train commute.
Back in the day, before podcasts were popular, when I had a long early drive to work, I used to do this with late night talk shows. I cobbled together a system with an old-school VCR and a digitizer, along with some creative use of QuickTime, AppleScript and iTunes. My Mac automatically converted the opening monologues to MP3 and synced them to my iPod nightly. Sounds crazy I know, but it worked really well for me! lol
This is definitely something that has crossed our minds. Now that we have the client list of recently active clients in the DVR interface it will be easier for us to do this. We also have some capabilities to initiate some of those downloads in the background. We would be at the mercy of Apple's Background Task APIs, so it wouldn't be immediate, but it would be possible if you queued up some downloads that it would be done over night.
This is also something that we're looking at for the future. There are a lot of edge cases to get right for these things, but we'll get there eventually.
Love this.
Is the iOS test flight app supposed to crash when you press on the timeline of the grid guide?
I can swipe it left or right to change the time view, but accidentally held it and it crashes everytime.
Not sure how to submit a report from my iPad.
No. However, this bug is present in the stable release version, too.
Ah, you're correct. Happens in both.
Nice catch thanks.
I downloaded 2 recordings.
Went offline and played them (just scrubbing and skipping around).
I then deleted both from within the app and closed the app.
iPad Storage still shows Channels Beta as taking up 1.9GB for Documents and Data.
Verified by starting the app again and there's no Download button, so it knows the recordings are gone.
Connected back to wifi and started the app.
Look in Library > Downloads and it's empty.
iPad setting still shows the 1.9GB.
Submitted Diagnostics from the app Settings > Support > Submit Diagnostics
What does Settings -> Support list under Clear Disk Cache?