How does updating Retrospect work?
There has been a lot of confusion on how Retrospect update work. So this KB article is an attempt to explain the main ideas and principles behind the system. And...
Contents
Retrospect has a large number of configuration parameters or settings. All of them are accessible from the Add-on settings. They can be found from the context menu within the add-on, or when the add-on is highlighted in the video add-ons.
General settings
There are a number of common settings that change the overall behaviour of Retrospect. These settings are located under the General Settings tab.
Retrospect Add-on Settings
| Setting | Description |
| Maximum Stream bitrate | Setting that lets the user specify the maximum bit rate for the streams that are available. This setting can be changed if you experience any buffering issues. If only one stream is available this setting is ignored. If all streams have a higher bit rate, the lowest one is selected. |
| Sort by |
Defines the default sort algorithm that is set to Kodi. As soon as the user modifies the sorting for a folder from within Kodi, that sorting is kept for the current folder. |
| Hide Fanart | Should Retrospect hide all channel/program/episode fanarts? |
| Subtitle mode |
Defines whether to download and display subtitles. Possible values:
Keep in mind that sometimes subtitles are embedded in the streams and then Retrospect, or Retrospect does not control them. |
| Group lists if exceeds # folders | This setting will cause sub folders to be grouped alphabetically if the total number of sub folders exceeds the configured value. So if the value is set to 50, if the total number of sub folders exceeds 50, they will be grouped alphabetically and the list will thus contain folders like “Titles with ‘A’“, etc. |
| Empty List Behaviour | Sets how empty lists (so lists that really don’t have any child items):
|
| Folder prefix |
If you want folders to be better distinguishable, you can set a prefix that will be displayed for before each folder name. Keep in mind that this messes up the adjectives (the, a, an, de, het, een, etc) sensitive sorting within Kodi. |
DRM/Geo Location/Premium filters
| Setting | Description |
| Show DRM Warming | |
| Filter DRM Protected Items |
|
| Filter Premium/Paid items | |
| Apply Filter to | |
| Geo Location | If set to another value than None it will treat the configured value as the current region. This will cause all GEO blocked items that do not match the configured region to not appear. So setting it to Swedish will result in Swedish channels to show all content, even if it was GEO blocked. With this setting set to Swedish, the Dutch channels will not show GEO Blocked content. Setting it to None will always display all content in all channels. |
Advanced Settings
| Setting | Description |
| Send usage statistics | Retrospect sends anonymous usage statistics to our servers. This is used to analyse what channels, programs and episodes are watched the most. |
| Log level | Sets the log detail level for the Retrospect logging. This file is located in the main Retrospect add-on folder and can be used for troubleshooting.
The detail level of logging has as very large impact on performance, especially on low end (ATV2, rPi) systems. So best is to keep it at INFO level. |
| Cache HTTP Requests | Retrospect tries to cache all HTTP requests (taking their cache directives into consideration). This setting allows you to disable the caching. This will impact the responsiveness of the add-on as it will need to go back to the source for each action. |
Channel settings
There are a number of settings that control what channels are shown and/or what languages should be visible. Those settings can be found under the Channel Settings tab.
Channel settings control what channels are shown and/or what languages should be visible.
| Setting | Description |
| Show channels in categories |
If enabled, Retrospect will group channels in categories: Tech, Kids, National, Regional, Other, Radio, Video, Sport |
Select a language to manage it channels
This section allows the showing and hiding of channels based on:
- The channel itself
- The language of the channel
The procedure is as follows:
- Select a language using the Channel Language selector
- Either completely disable all channels with this language by disabling the Enabled toggle, or
- Find the channel you don’t want to see and disable it individually
Important: There seems to be a weird GUI issue, that makes re-enabling a complete language a bit complicated. If you select a disabled language and move one position down to the Enable option, it will scroll down to the bottom of the settings screen. Important is that even though you are at the bottom, the Enabled option is still selected, and hitting Enter or OK will enable the language.
Uitzendinggemist.nl settings
These settings are specific to the Dutch NPO channel and are mainly here to facilitate ATV2 and Raspberry PI based Kodi set-ups. These devices have issues streaming the NPO streams, so you can configure Retrospect to download them first and then play them. You can configure the maximum amount of days to keep streams on disk and the path where to keep them.
| Setting | Description |
| Cache clean-up after # days | The number of days to keep downloaded streams. If set to value “0” then no cache is kept at all and streams are actually streamed. |
| Cache Path |
The path that is used to store the streams. Keep in mind that a standard NPO stream has a size of around 400 MB. |
To be continued…….
