StreamFab and Scheduling

[KidJoe]

I too was burned by playon. I'm just starting to play with the StreamFab scheduling options so I can't go point by point with all your questions. I can only explain what I've done, and what my experiences have been.

Yesterday afternoon, as a test, I added series shows from HBOMax, Amazon, Disney+ and Peacock to my schedule in StramFab, with each set to check once per day at 12:00am. Unfortunately some were older shows, so I don't expect them to pick up new episodes, but I was more testing was scheduling available for that service, and it is! I will try other streaming services soon.

I had StreamFab open and downloading other things. This morning when I looked at the scheduled tab in StreamFab, "Last Updates" for each show said Mon April 11 00:00:41 2022. Last Week Tonight (HBOMax) also said 1 Video Added to queue. Looking at the download queue, sure enough S09E07 which per HBOMax web site aired on April 10, was added to

So in that respect, StreamFab scheduling is working like PlayOn. Checking once per day for new episodes and added them to the download queue.

Here is a slight difference. PlayOn would add the shows to the queue and would also also immediately download them. With StreamFab the new Last Week Tonight was added to StreamFab's download queue, but the download didn't auto start. I don't know if this is expected, or if its because I had the download queue running with other things when Last Week Tonight was added. I never used the YouTube scheduler, so I don't know if it works similarly, and there isn't info on this new scheduling feature for the VIP Services on the StreamFab sales web site yet.

I also don't know how it keeps track of what was downloaded to determine what is new. For example, what happens if I move these downloads from the 'download folder' to the TV folder on my PlexServer?

As far as credentials. With Playon I had to re-enter and test my credentials for each service ALOT!! sometimes several times per week, other times once every 30 days. With StreamFab I have rarely, if ever, had to re-enter my credentials for the streaming providers.

[ParadoxGBB]

Hello all,

I was very excited to see that StreamFab added a scheduling feature in version 5.0.2.8. As a lifetime PlayOn user that was burned by recent updates there, I'd love to evaluate this and I have a few questions for others that might be using this that has implications for how StreamFab is going to integrate with this feature. To me, this feature was the only functional gap between StreamFab and PlayOn.

1) When in trial mode will StreamFab attempt to download new scheduled shows if you still are within quota? The popup implies no, but it allowed me to create the schedule anyway. I'll find out in a few days I guess.

2) I'm really curious here what others' experience here is around the software being more or less hands-off and automatic. I've had to enter in credentials repeatedly in Audials and StreamFab, especially after taking new updates, and that seems to run counter to the goal here and could be one of the reasons why PlayOn requires you to separately configure credentials per source/channel. Does anyone here feel confident walking away from your PC for a week?

3) Related to 2), PlayOn takes updates automatically, and while there's a startup application configured for StreamFab ("StreamUpdate.exe") so far I think it doesn't do anything but notify, and even then not very quickly. Especially for me at least as I keep my PC on 24/7.

For anyone interested, it appears that the approach here is that a portion StreamFab doesn't run as a separate background service like PlayOn, but rather creates a scheduled task to run StreamFab with the "TaskScheduler" parameter. Not sure yet how it distinguishes between each show that way and whether it's something that can be micromanaged through automation yet.

Thanks for any insights anyone can provide!