Hi
@SamuriHL
You raise some valid points about the complexities of implementing a feature like this into
AnyStreamPlus. Personally, I think everything with software development is complex, but absolutely amazing to say the least. I wish I had that skill, but I know where my level of patience lies…
One thing I've learned over my years working in IT is that solutions come from discussions just like these; from a basic level of understanding that helps the experts see things in a different light and helps them look for solutions outside their normal scope and understanding.
For this reason, I'd like to highlight a few points that you've made - that I admittedly did not think of - in hopes they aide the dev team with this being a potential future enhancement when the time is right.
You don't have control over how long someone "pauses" a queue. Let's say you stop the queue and don't come back to it for many days or even weeks. What's in the queue may have changed in the service you're downloading from. So AS would need to validate each entry in the queue and flag the ones that are no longer valid or have changed. What if it's valid but the stream options changed? Etc etc.
Pausing the Download Queue is a current and wonderful feature. Considering titles expire overnight - often at midnight - there will be occasions that our queue will see a title that is not downloaded prior to its scheduled expiration date/time; especially for those who run an overnight queue. Although many Providers have titles
scheduled to be removed, they are still notorious for removing titles on very short notice, or no notice at all. So, avoiding these types of situations is very unlikely.
Although I have not verified this, I think AS is
currently capable of responding to these types of situations. Title not downloadable? AS responds with an error and moves on regardless of the underlying reason the title was not downloadable.
For example,
Knives Out is scheduled to expire at
9PM Pacific Daylight Time tonight.
I would test this out this evening, but the drm issues currently prevent that test from being performed. I would need to ensure this title was added to my queue prior to expiration and not attempt the download until after the title expires. This would certainly be a great test to see how AS currently responds to a title that expired while it was in the queue.
Now I'm thinking about how it would respond if the title expired
during the download… interesting.