• Using OSTV
• OSTV Menus
• Traversing the OSTV menus
• Remote button functions and keyboard equivalents
• The OSTV DVR
• Backsave
• Schedule
• Bittorrent
• live tv seek mode off
• Play Directory

Using OSTV

Using OSTV does not explain every feature. Hopefully much of it is intuitive and can be picked up by using. If you have a question, ask it in a comment, I'd be happy to answer.

OSTV Menus

The Main Menu

• Schedule
• Watch
• Adj Picture
• Utilities
• Quit

The Watch Menu

• Recordings
• Web Channels
• Web Programs
• OTA/QAM
• Play Directory
• Webstreams

If you do not have all the plugins installed, not all of these choices will be there. OSTV opens with the Watch menu because that is what you will be doing most of the time. To open the Main Menu just tap the OK on the remote a couple of times.

Traversing the OSTV menus

OSTV creates the menus, they are really MPlayer menus. The MPlayer menu system has one peculiarity to be aware of. When you are going through the menus with the right arrow and reach a final selection, a press of the right arrow would be the same as "OK" or "Enter". This messes up the OSTV scheme. When reaching a final selection press "OK" for a remote or "Enter" on your keyboard.

The menu will let you know what you need to press, "<>" next to the selection indicates the arrow keys and an asterisk-* means "OK" or "Enter". If you make a mistake you will be stuck in the menu mode. Simply press "clear" or key "esc" to get out.

Remote button functions and keyboard equivalents

Keyboard Control

Additional Keyboard commands and documentation is within ~/.ostv/config/input.conf

The OSTV DVR

When you play a video file you can pause it, go forward or backwards. You can do this with live tv with a dvr application like OSTV because you are really just watching another video file. A dvr records as you watch. Whatever over the air(ota) channel you are watching is being recorded as ~/recordings/tv.dump. You are really watching tv.dump. When you tune in a new channel, tv.dump is deleted and starts recording anew. Unless you rename tv.dump--we'll get to that later--that is the only way tv.dump is deleted. You can watch something, turn off OSTV, turn OSTV on the next day, load tv.dump(the video button on a remote or "l" on a keyboard will do that. You could also select it just like any other file) and watch the same program again. If you tune another channel you will screw this up, so OSTV has the ability to "backsave".

Backsave

Backsave goes back and save what you just watched. This is selectable from main->utilities->backsave. A name will be generated based on the info on hand such as time, date and channel, it will be saved in ~/recordings/ostv.

This concept is used for webvideo too. If you install the webvideo plugin and use it to download and watch a video it is saved as webvideo.dump in ~/recordings/. Similarly, each time you watch something new it will be written over, but you always have the option to backsave. OSTV gets the titles of webvideos and remembers them and will rename them thusly. Web videos are saved in ~/recordings/webvideo.

Schedule

The Schedule plugin gives you the ability to schedule recordings of OTA TV. It too records as tv.dump and only gets renamed when the recording is finished. There is even an option to not rename it. Why would you do that? If you know you are going to watch it before tuning anything else in, it will disappear as soon as you later tune in another channel and that is low maintenance!

Named recordings will write over themselves too. For instance if you record 30 Rock each week as 30-Rock, each week's will write over the previous week. To avoid this, title the recording 30-Rock+d and it will be saved with the date appended. This weeks, for instance, would be 30-Rock0716, and next weeks as 30-Rock0723.

The Schedule menu has "New" options and "View/Cancel". "View/Cancel" will list all your scheduled items. Selecting one will delete it. Changes in the list will not be reflected until OSTV is restarted. If you are just viewing your scheduled recordings, be careful not to key OK/Enter. To leave the the menu, key < or clear, or the keyboard equivalents.

"New" takes you through a series of menus to set a recording. When entering a title using your remote cell phone style don't forget what was in the "Traversing the OSTV menus" section. To select the letter "n" for instance, you would press the "6" key twice and then the > (right arrow) key. Do not press OK or key enter until the last selection signified by "*".

Schedule also will update the menu of your web programs and channels and download shows with bittorrent at a scheduled time.

Spaces are not permitted in titles for OTA and Bittorrent. For Bittorrent replace spaces with a "+". "The Daily Show" should be entered as:

The+Daily+Show

The menus will remind you of this. Be sure to use the exact name of the title as they appear in the web addresses below in the bittorrent section.

When using your remote "cell phone style" the 0 key will access "+", numbers and other characters useful in titles such as ".", "-" and "_".

OSTV menus are created when the OSTV is started up, a new or canceled schedule item will not be reflected in the menus until OSTV is restarted.

You can also update your webvideo menus by selecting main->Utilities->Update-Menus.

Bittorrent

In addition to scheduling, Bittorrent downloads can be activated from the command line:

$ ostv bt "exact name of show"

(You need to get the case accurate too, spaces are ok from the cli.)

If a torrent is not found you will get a notification if you have libnotify-bin installed. Unfortunately notifications do not work from schedule(because crontab hasn't updated itself to handle these newfangled graphical program things ;) ).

The OSTV bittorrent plugin will look for the title at:

[http://www.mininova.org/search/vtv/8

and then, if it is not found there, at:

http://twitter.com/eztv_it

In each instance only the first 20 titles are searched. These sources reliably provide quality, active torrents. Timing is everything for this to work. If you are scheduling a bittorrent, get to know what shows up at the above links and schedule accordingly. Things could change drastically overnight in the bittorrent world. Mininova, for instance is involved in protracted legalities, so this plugin may need updates and the command line capabilities are a backup to any glitches.

You can open the Deluge gui to check on the progress of your torrent downloads, but be sure only to minimize it when done. Closing the gui will also shut down the daemon and stop your download. The download/seeding would resume though just by re-opening the gui.

live tv seek mode off

When I first started messing around with what would become OSTV it was most irritating when I would > through a commercial and go over the end of file and jump back to the beginning. I included something that knows where the end of tv.dump is and will not let you seek past. You get a message "seek exceeds end". Sometimes this will not work, but this is rare. This is only implemented for live tv (tv.dump). I think it is unnecessary for anything else.

If you are recording tv, but watching another video file, this could be activated and you could get the message "seek exceeds end" while trying to skip forward. Select main->utilities->live tv seek mode off from the menu.

Play Directory

OSTV has a unique way to play playlists. From the Play Directory item in the Watch menu, every Directory will be listed. To select one will play every file in it as a playlist. If there is a subdirectory that will be played too. Watching a playlist entails saving files to a directory. Placing symbolic links in a directory works too. Play Directory works for all directories inside of ~/recordings.