I've been working to try and use the Kister method to record a Youtube live broadcast that I want to watch each week. It comes on at noon on Sundays each week and I was able to get it successfully added as a custom source, so far so good. However, now I want to record this show each Sunday from noon to 1:30, but I can't find a way to make that happen. Is there a way in Channels to just set a 1.5 hr recording every Sunday on that custom channel, or some other way to go about it? I did some searches on "manual recording" in the forums and that seems fairly complicated. Any thoughts and suggestions would be extremely helpful. Thanks!
If the channel from the Kister method is showing 1 hr blocks, create a Series pass for the 12:00PM blocks and edit it in advanced passes to add 30 minutes end padding and limit it to only Sunday.
Time CONTAINS Sunday 12PM
Should look like this
SeriesID == placeholder/yt2m3u8-Channel/12PM
Time CONTAINS Sunday 12PM
This is one I'm using to record only weekdays at 2PM
SeriesID == placeholder/yt2m3u8-Channel/2PM
Time CONTAINS Monday
Time CONTAINS Tuesday
Time CONTAINS Wednesday
Time CONTAINS Thursday
Time CONTAINS Friday
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I have been using Media Human to download YouTube videos that it converts into a video format that Channels can play. You can setup a Media Human tracker on the YouTube channel that posts the weekly video you want to grab and tell it to check every week. Then I have a Library Collection setup in Channels for each YouTube channel I monitor. Media Human is crippleware and has some limitation so I paid for the full version. It has been rock solid for over a year now. I used to use TubeSync but found it to be unreliable but I never spent much time trying to figure out the issue.
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That's good for video clips, but it doesn't work for Live channels, right?
Perfect, thank you! I think I'm going to have to wait till their live stream posts as active again to try. I'm getting a "error getting stream title" when I look right now in the guide, but I'm assuming that's because the live stream link is only active when they are live. Thanks again!
That's good to know too, for posted videos. I didn't even realize something like that existed. Thanks!
Are you using this trick to redirect to their live stream?
Example for TWiT TV https://www.youtube.com/@twit/live
If the Youtube account has one live stream it goes right to it. If they have no live streams it should end up at https://www.youtube.com/@AccountName/streams. If they have multiple live streams, it picks the most recent one, like https://www.youtube.com/@SkyNews/live
I had originally tried that approach, but it wouldn't create the custom channel for me. So instead I waited until they published the link to the live stream for that day and used that v=akdfjlksa type approach instead, which did create the channel. I can try the @channelname way again, but without any active live streams, I'm not sure it will work.
Nope, no luck, I get this:
invalid source url: failed to retrieve m3u: GET: https://kister.net/mpl/[email protected]: 400 Bad Request
That's the case if there's no current live streaming.
You can see what it's doing if you go there in your browser https://www.youtube.com/@sgp.church/live
It actually ends up at https://www.youtube.com/@sgp.church/streams
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Yeah, it behaves a little wonky when the stream isn't active. when I wrote the code i was imagining it for streams that were 24/7/365, wasn't thinking about lives that were only now-and-then.
The title being an error won't actually affect the watching/recording though -- Channels will still try to watch the feed each time you select that channel. It just won't work if the live feed is off. You should still be able to create the pass, just not by title-- channel or series should work though.
To get a 1.5 hour block like @chDVRuser was mentioning, make sure you have ,ph=5400 appended to the url, like https://kister.net/mpl/yt2m3u8?v=8KGXSjtS5pk,ph=5400. That's another artifact of me not thinking time guide data would be useful because of the types of 24/7/365 videos i was thinking of (live cams all over the world, beach cams, etc). It will take some time for the ph setting to take effect, unless you do it manually (I think fetch guide updates from settings does it)
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And if you use the 1.5hr blocks ,ph=5400 instead of 1hr blocks ,ph=3600 then you wouldn't add 30 minutes end padding to the pass. I prefer the 1hr blocks ,ph=3600 so the start/stop times align to the hour and then pad as necessary.
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Perfect example of how using /live plays the latest of their 24 live streams https://www.youtube.com/@ILoveYouVenice/live
Thank you both @jkister and @chDVRuser those were perfect suggestions!
So, adding the ,ph=5400 to the end created the blocks needed. Without that, it was just one giant, ever-running, long show, without an option to create a pass. But with it broken into blocks, then I could select a block of time and it gave me the option to create a pass.
Then using the original suggestion around using the advanced logic to limit the recording to just time containing Sunday 12:00pm, I'm able to limit the pass to just the noon window when it will air.
Excellent!! Thank you both so much, I really appreciate it!
Now that i think about it, @chDVRuser's 1 hour blocks (ph=3600) with a 30 minute padding on the end might be a better idea. With 1.5 hour blocks, I'm not sure if Channels will be consistent with starting at 12:00 or 12:30.
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That's a good point, easy enough to change. Thanks for the follow up!