Vacation Wows

[TV_Ken]

I am away from home for 2 months with my only internet access being through my cell phone. I'm using Mobile-Hotspot to play Channels on my tablet.

I set my playback speed to 700k which is the lowest I can go and still watch it.

I am half way through my cell phone billing cycle and have already used up my 50gb data allowance for the month. My transmission rate has slowed down so playback keeps starting and stopping.

I could be using a lot less data if Channels had an audio only mode. If this was available, I could use it 40% to 50% of my playback time.

Please, please can we have an audio only option?

[racameron]

Audio-only mode for DVR users

We'd like to add something like this too, but its complicated because to get background audio you have to use the system audio player. One thing you can do in the meantime is to use the web UI. You can right click copy url on the Watch Now button, then change the url to add ?vcodec=none&acodec=mp3 at the end. So something like http://xxx.channelsdvr.net:8089/devices/ANY/channels/123/hls?vcodec=none&acodec=mp3. Open that in safari and it will start playing and audio-only stream from channel 123. …

You can still use this workaround. Caveat, though: it no longer works directly on iOS. However, if you have remote/VPN access to your home and can access your DVR server via its LAN/local address, you can use the direct LAN address of your server in VLC to get it working on iOS.

[TV_Ken]

I'm using Windows server and Android viewer. I have no VPN. Does this translate to my setup?

I don't need audio to play in the background, all I need is to set the video playback speed to zero.

[racameron]

My workaround is no longer necessary; this is now addressed:

Audio-only mode for DVR users

New build going out now makes this easier with /devices/ANY/channels/6003/hls/audio.m3u8 That link will now work on both iOS and Android devices, letting them pick between aac and mp3 depending on what is preferred on the platform. There is also now a link on the web UI in the watch now dropdown, called Audio Only. You can click that, or right-click copy it.