Download Queue Selection

[Aareses]

@MikeKobb

It would be fantastic to have a checkbox next to each title in the downloads queue. That way when downloads are "Resumed" only the titles checked, would download. The remainder would stay in the queue.

Currently, having to watch the downloads queue and "Pause" it right after the last title I would like downloaded, is downloaded doesn't always work. Often times another title starts downloading before I catch it.

I only have 6TB and a queue of about 200 titles I've purchased from the store that need to be downloaded and watched. With the current download system, if I miss "Pause" on the download queue after a title has downloaded, the next title starts being downloaded and counts against the storage for the full title, even though it hasn't been downloaded yet. Most of the time, it is just inconvenient to watch the queue. I can't always do that.

The Strato is good at managing the space and resuming the queue even if stopped in the middle of downloading a title, but I've found when I max out storage, it performs more slowly as do most modern day computers, phones, etc. I'm trying to keep a certain amount of free space, which I've found does help performance and reduces the few errors I have sometime seen.

Having a way to select which titles in the queue should actually be downloaded during that session, would be amazing for some of us who have to continually delete titles, and download new ones due to limited space.

 

[Oldred]

@MikeKobb

It would be fantastic to have a checkbox next to each title in the downloads queue. That way when downloads are "Resumed" only the titles checked, would download. The remainder would stay in the queue.

Currently, having to watch the downloads queue and "Pause" it right after the last title I would like downloaded, is downloaded doesn't always work. Often times another title starts downloading before I catch it.

I only have 6TB and a queue of about 200 titles I've purchased from the store that need to be downloaded and watched. With the current download system, if I miss "Pause" on the download queue after a title has downloaded, the next title starts being downloaded and counts against the storage for the full title, even though it hasn't been downloaded yet. Most of the time, it is just inconvenient to watch the queue. I can't always do that.

The Strato is good at managing the space and resuming the queue even if stopped in the middle of downloading a title, but I've found when I max out storage, it performs more slowly as do most modern day computers, phones, etc. I'm trying to keep a certain amount of free space, which I've found does help performance and reduces the few errors I have sometime seen.

Having a way to select which titles in the queue should actually be downloaded during that session, would be amazing for some of us who have to continually delete titles, and download new ones due to limited space.

I may be misunderstanding but when you purchase a movie you can select to not download it. So purchase as many movies as you like and just manually download the ones to the server when you want them? Apologies if I have misunderstood. I hadn’t realised you could do that until one of my servers was out of action tbh.

 

[cinelife]

Yes, correct. After you purchase the movie (online), go to the "Manage" then "Downloads" and select the small downward arrow to the right of the movie and select "Remove." It will remain in your movie collection and can be downloaded at any time.

Jim

 

[Aareses]

Apologies for not being clear. Let's say you have 175 movies on your 6TB Kaleidescape Strato, which means its full. You run into a bunch of great deals to upgrade and/or purchase new titles from the Kaleidescape Store. You purchase 217 new titles, which all automatically go into your download queue.

You notice that your strato regularly throws playback errors during movies when the disk is full, so you make sure to leave at least 200 GB of space to minimize playback errors. Playback errors are not why we spend all this money for a Kaleidescape!

Life is busy, so you aren't able to download and watch all 217 titles in a short period of time, but Kaleidescape keeps putting out upgrades and new titles you want, so your download list continues to grow.

You can either remove each title from your download queue one-by-one OR you can just click the "Remove All" button at the top of the downloads page and clear your download queue from all titles to make it really easy...but this is not what you want.

Why not just remove all your new titles and put the titles you just want to download in the download queue? Perhaps you have 1500 titles and it wouldn't be easy to pick through them to find the titles you had just purchased or upgraded. But you say, "My Movies" are automatically ordered by the titles you have most recently purchased. Unfortunately, that doesn't account for the movies you have already watched, so it's not as easy as a shiny new checkbox on the download queues page. It's also a lot more scrolling and shifting to new pages, rather than the handy list on the download page. I've tried and it's nowhere as convenient.

What you want is something like a checkbox next to each title in the download. This would be next to the dropdown error to remove a title or the up/down error to move a title up or down into the download queue. That third column on the right would be a simple checkbox, so whenever a new title is purchased or upgraded, the title would act the same way it does now, but automatically check the box next to the title.

Those who are experiencing similar issues, want to save space for new titles they want immediately, or just want to limit the number of automatic downloads could simply uncheck this new box and the titles would not automatically download. But you say, just simply Pause the queue as soon as all the titles you want are downloaded.

It's more fun to sit and watch a Kaleidescape queue download movies than it is to watch paint dry, but they are in a similar category for me. I just don't have the time to do that. In my unique situation, it's actually a huge detriment. I have to delete freshly downloaded titles to make some free space, or I will experience playback errors at times. That's even worse!

Why not contact Kaleidescape and have them repair or replace your unit? I've tried that. 6TB Stratos do not have field replaceable hard drives and I was told Kaleidescape does not repair these units, but they will sell a refurbished unit or you can buy another. The refurbished units cost well more than I paid for my Strato. Not an option for me, unfortunately. A Terra upgrade would be awesome, but also not an option.

Having the ability to deselect certain titles from automatically downloading so the hard drive doesn't just get automatically filled up would be helpful for many situations, not just my more obscure one. I hope that explains it a bit better.

 

[Oldred]

Apologies for not being clear. Let's say you have 175 movies on your 6TB Kaleidescape Strato, which means its full. You run into a bunch of great deals to upgrade and/or purchase new titles from the Kaleidescape Store. You purchase 217 new titles, which all automatically go into your download queue.

You notice that your strato regularly throws playback errors during movies when the disk is full, so you make sure to leave at least 200 GB of space to minimize playback errors. Playback errors are not why we spend all this money for a Kaleidescape!

Life is busy, so you aren't able to download and watch all 217 titles in a short period of time, but Kaleidescape keeps putting out upgrades and new titles you want, so your download list continues to grow.

You can either remove each title from your download queue one-by-one OR you can just click the "Remove All" button at the top of the downloads page and clear your download queue from all titles to make it really easy...but this is not what you want.

Why not just remove all your new titles and put the titles you just want to download in the download queue? Perhaps you have 1500 titles and it wouldn't be easy to pick through them to find the titles you had just purchased or upgraded. But you say, "My Movies" are automatically ordered by the titles you have most recently purchased. Unfortunately, that doesn't account for the movies you have already watched, so it's not as easy as a shiny new checkbox on the download queues page. It's also a lot more scrolling and shifting to new pages, rather than the handy list on the download page. I've tried and it's nowhere as convenient.

What you want is something like a checkbox next to each title in the download. This would be next to the dropdown error to remove a title or the up/down error to move a title up or down into the download queue. That third column on the right would be a simple checkbox, so whenever a new title is purchased or upgraded, the title would act the same way it does now, but automatically check the box next to the title.

Those who are experiencing similar issues, want to save space for new titles they want immediately, or just want to limit the number of automatic downloads could simply uncheck this new box and the titles would not automatically download. But you say, just simply Pause the queue as soon as all the titles you want are downloaded.

It's more fun to sit and watch a Kaleidescape queue download movies than it is to watch paint dry, but they are in a similar category for me. I just don't have the time to do that. In my unique situation, it's actually a huge detriment. I have to delete freshly downloaded titles to make some free space, or I will experience playback errors at times. That's even worse!

Why not contact Kaleidescape and have them repair or replace your unit? I've tried that. 6TB Stratos do not have field replaceable hard drives and I was told Kaleidescape does not repair these units, but they will sell a refurbished unit or you can buy another. The refurbished units cost well more than I paid for my Strato. Not an option for me, unfortunately. A Terra upgrade would be awesome, but also not an option.

Having the ability to deselect certain titles from automatically downloading so the hard drive doesn't just get automatically filled up would be helpful for many situations, not just my more obscure one. I hope that explains it a bit better.

If you have already built up that massive queue then it won’t help. But what I was referring to was at the point of purchase. You are offered the chance of what format to purchase it in. One of the drop down options is to not download this movie. I.e. it isn’t added to the download queue at all until you choose to do that.

Not sure I fully understand why you can’t just remove all items from the queue and just download the ones you want to watch when you choose to do so but it seems important to you. Does putting the movies you haven’t watched into a ‘to watch next collection help? Or even into a set of custom collections so that organise clear your movies.

I’ll give up and let someone more knowledgeable respond.

If you really have bought 217 new titles and have them all in your queue, congrats, it sounds like a good problem to have

 

[Aareses]

If you have already built up that massive queue then it won’t help. But what I was referring to was at the point of purchase. You are offered the chance of what format to purchase it in. One of the drop down options is to not download this movie. I.e. it isn’t added to the download queue at all until you choose to do that.

Not sure I fully understand why you can’t just remove all items from the queue and just download the ones you want to watch when you choose to do so but it seems important to you. Does putting the movies you haven’t watched into a ‘to watch next collection help? Or even into a set of custom collections so that organise clear your movies.

I’ll give up and let someone more knowledgeable respond.

If you really have bought 217 new titles and have them all in your queue, congrats, it sounds like a good problem to have

My download queue is full and "There are 150 additional items in this queue." There are 250 downloads in my queue now.

Not downloading hasn't been successful for me because of the sheer number of unwatched, but also because its much tougher to see ONLY the movies that are unwatched. As described in my previous post, "My Movies" shows the latest titles purchased or upgraded, but its the full list, not the list of unwatched or not downloaded, which is what I'm looking for. It's also harder to view by scrolling up and down the page and especially having to go through 9 pages. The downloads page is a nice tidy list of exactly what I want to see. What I need to watch next.

Right now, I have a nice tidy list of titles I need to watch next, which are all on one page. Removing all from the queue would put me into the situation I described above, which is much more convulted. You can only put titles that have already been downloaded into a "Watch Next" collection.

Yes, I have a good problem with a lot of titles that were upgraded or new, but I also have a bad problem with a 6TB Strato that is throwing errors whenever the disks are full. It would be awesome to have a way to more easily manage which titles download from the download queue. There is room on the page and the software engineer part of me believes it would not be hard to pull off.

This feature wouldn't be just for my use case, which is unique. I don't expect Kaleidescape to write something for an obscure situation. This suggested feature would help a LOT of other people that want to save some space on their system and not have the automatic downloads take all available space because they aren't there to watch the download queue. For example, you purposefully save space for that new release or rental when company is over, instead of having to decide which titles to delete so you can download something else. There was a similar request on another thread.

Another way to handle it is to have an option to save "X" amount of space on the Kaleidescape and then "authorize" to go over the limit if needed. That won't work nearly as well, but its something.

I know there are many people who use a similar workflow of deleting and downloading new titles.

I really appreciate you offering suggestions!

 

[andy]

The software (called KEAOS) is designed to reserve enough space to allow your system to continue to perform well without errors. I’m curious what kind of errors you have encountered. Have you asked K support to investigate? I know this is not related to your request around the download queue, but I find it odd that you see errors due to the system being too full. My 10TB Strato has been at capacity more than once and I did not encounter errors as a result.

Andy


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Transepoch]

The software (called KEAOS) is designed to reserve enough space to allow your system to continue to perform well without errors. I’m curious what kind of errors you have encountered.

It's not unique to the Encore line, as I've always found it better to reserve more space than KEAOS itself holds back (though not as much as Aareses) to help keep the UI more responsive. Does it work? Sure, but not as well as when the servers have 50-100GB free (maybe it is related to working better when qualified as a valid import target.)

While the use case is definitely there, and probably not so unique, I can also see K's answer being "the solution is buying more storage" (and they wouldn't exactly be wrong to hold that position.) I would suggest that what could be a reasonable alternative for aiding this specific scenario, while also improving the interface overall, is to (1) allow for our collections to have cloud/store persistence, and (2) allow us to assign collection membership at purchase. Then new purchases could be added to a "To be downloaded" collection, instead of using the master download queue for that purpose.

 

[andy]

I like your idea of being able to add movies to a collection at purchase, and better yet sort the “My Movies” page by those collections. I’d also like to be able to “download/adapt” the pre-defined store collections to my system without having to manually recreate them.

Andy


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Aareses]

The software (called KEAOS) is designed to reserve enough space to allow your system to continue to perform well without errors. I’m curious what kind of errors you have encountered. Have you asked K support to investigate? I know this is not related to your request around the download queue, but I find it odd that you see errors due to the system being too full. My 10TB Strato has been at capacity more than once and I did not encounter errors as a result.

Andy


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Hey Andy! I'm not familiar with KEAOS, but that makes total sense and I had always suspected K reserves space for multiple things.

I've had my Strato for about 5 years now. I did not experience playback errors until last year. Since, they have become increasingly worse. My workflow used to be to never pause downloads. The system handled all that for me and it worked like a charm.
Over the past year, I've noticed when I get those errors, every time so far, it's been when the Strato was completely full, meaning no more downloads could occur.

I contacted K Support and they told me there were more errors on a hard drive than normal. They stated the unit could not be "repaired" and the drives could not be replaced. The only two options given were a new unit through a reseller or a refurbished unit through Kaleidescape. That refurbished price was substantially more than I originally paid for the unit. I'm in no position for that or a Terra server. I'm not very happy about the response. I think they can do better for their customers, but that's another thread.

I work in IT, so I decided to try keeping more free space on the drives. Often times that helps most machines. So far, it has been working pretty good. No errors when I keep a few hundred GB of storage. I accidentally filled up the drive on Christmas downloads because I got distracted, so once again the drive was full.

On Christmas my family sat down to watch Home Alone. We got about 2 minutes into the movie and it stopped playback and wouldn't continue.

Sometimes, I could skip a chapter and rewind to the spot that's having issues and it has worked. Other times that does not work. This time it did not, so our family couldn't watch the movie we wanted to watch. It was too late to delete a bunch of movies, download the movie again, then watch.

So yah, I've noticed that when the hard drive is completely full with the KEAOS storage reservation, I get errors. When my Strato is full, I get errors occasionally.

For me, having an easy feature that would allow me to create a list from my non-downloaded movies would work. It would also work to have a checkbox for movies in the download queue. Hoping there is a fix!

 

[Aareses]

It's not unique to the Encore line, as I've always found it better to reserve more space than KEAOS itself holds back (though not as much as Aareses) to help keep the UI more responsive. Does it work? Sure, but not as well as when the servers have 50-100GB free (maybe it is related to working better when qualified as a valid import target.)

While the use case is definitely there, and probably not so unique, I can also see K's answer being "the solution is buying more storage" (and they wouldn't exactly be wrong to hold that position.) I would suggest that what could be a reasonable alternative for aiding this specific scenario, while also improving the interface overall, is to (1) allow for our collections to have cloud/store persistence, and (2) allow us to assign collection membership at purchase. Then new purchases could be added to a "To be downloaded" collection, instead of using the master download queue for that purpose.

View attachment 3250

Transepoch, I totally agree! Electronics with storage just work better when they are not close to their maximum. There is NO question after all these years working in IT. That's just a fact.

Having the capability to organize our libraries into collections would be a viable option for sure!

Another option would be to add a setting in KEAOS to control the maximum amount of storage it will use. That way it would not download any content that would exceed a user defined threshold, like 80% or 90%, etc.

Options:

1) Checkbox in Download Queue for Each Title
2) Capability to Create and Manage Collections for non-downloaded Content
3) Feature to limit available storage space

Any of those 3 options would solve issues for many and give others new capabilities.

 

[Aareses]

I like your idea of being able to add movies to a collection at purchase, and better yet sort the “My Movies” page by those collections. I’d also like to be able to “download/adapt” the pre-defined store collections to my system without having to manually recreate them.

Andy


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Totally agree!

 

[TrackZ]

I like your idea of being able to add movies to a collection at purchase, and better yet sort the “My Movies” page by those collections. I’d also like to be able to “download/adapt” the pre-defined store collections to my system without having to manually recreate them.

Andy


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Collections need to be sync'ed across the platform within our accounts so they have permanent-collection status. We very much need this. Right now collections only work on device for downloaded movies.

 

[Aareses]

Collections need to be sync'ed across the platform within our accounts so they have permanent-collection status. We very much need this. Right now collections only work on device for downloaded movies.

This would indeed solve several issues for many.

 

[Oldred]

Thanks for replying above. I am sure it’s testing your patience. I think it was the ‘download’ solution that was ‘throwing me’.
In your current situation I understand how it is the crunch point. The nature of that as you say for a different thread. I do worry for you that a bigger problem looms ahead of you with those disk errors but you already appreciate that I am sure and so good luck.

If it was me and understanding how IT tends to be prioritised I would push for all purchased movies/etc to be supported within custom collections. Simply because its use case will be applicable to a larger number of customers - even those with disk space.
I phrase it that way deliberately because I am not sure (due to network, K outages) we want collections lists 'only' stored in the cloud. Replicating it in the cloud might well have a use case but I am not totally sure what it is other than backup in case of disk failure? Adding all purchases into collections should give you a way through your issues and reduce the stress of watching those downloads.

Main point - is that I hope you get some improved solution. All the best. - edit - it's taken me so long to get around to complete that post that I am likely repeating others - oops.

 

[Aareses]

Thanks for replying above. I am sure it’s testing your patience. I think it was the ‘download’ solution that was ‘throwing me’.
In your current situation I understand how it is the crunch point. The nature of that as you say for a different thread. I do worry for you that a bigger problem looms ahead of you with those disk errors but you already appreciate that I am sure and so good luck.

If it was me and understanding how IT tends to be prioritised I would push for all purchased movies/etc to be supported within custom collections. Simply because its use case will be applicable to a larger number of customers - even those with disk space.
I phrase it that way deliberately because I am not sure (due to network, K outages) we want collections lists 'only' stored in the cloud. Replicating it in the cloud might well have a use case but I am not totally sure what it is other than backup in case of disk failure? Adding all purchases into collections should give you a way through your issues and reduce the stress of watching those downloads.

Main point - is that I hope you get some improved solution. All the best. - edit - it's taken me so long to get around to complete that post that I am likely repeating others - oops.

It's all good. I appreciate you stepping in and helping come up with a solution! That is very appreciated.

The checkbox next to each title in the downloads queue OR the collections for all movies in our libraries would both work. I would get more use out of the latter in other situations as well.