In a previous forum article I explained why all webcast archive streams in our archive are five hours long. It’s a legal requirement for a continuous, non-interactive streaming service.
Some stations need to exclude certain programming. We support this with a feature in the program schedule in Spinitron. When you create or edit a show and there’s a Disable webcast archive checkbox. It tells the archive stream server to skip over those time-slots when making archive streams.
So, for example, let’s say a show from 4 to 5 pm is marked as Disable webcast archive. If a listener starts the archive player from 2:30 pm, Spinitron builds a five-hour long stream by splicing together the 2:30 to 4 pm recording with the 5 to 8:30 pm recording. In other words, the archive playback skips over the excluded 4 to 5 pm time-slot.
Now lets say the Disable webcast archive checkbox is checked for a show from 2 to 5 pm. When a listener requests the archive to play from 3 pm, or at any time during that show, Spinitron creates a five-hour archive stream starting at 5 pm running to 10 pm.
The Spinitron web site and archive player doesn’t always this make behavior obvious and we accept that this can lead to confusion and any such confusion represents a bug that’s our fault. For now we are not sure how best to fix that.
On the plus side, according to our testing, the feature works. Any shows that you mark as Disable webcast archive in the schedule are excluded from archive streaming.