Watching

The Player view turns ERD-Playlist Studio into a television. The picture fills the view, the arrow keys change channel, and what is on is shown over the picture for a few seconds before it gets out of the way. It plays live channels, radio stations, films and series episodes from the playlist you have open.

• Open the Player view from the rail on the left, or with Ctrl+5.
• In the playlist, right-click a stream and choose Watch (Listen for a radio station). In the TV Guide, right-click a channel or a programme and choose Watch this channel. In the Films and Series views, choose Watch.
• In the Player view itself, press Up or Down to start on the first or last stream, or type its number.
• When you come back to a playlist, the Player view has the channel you watched last time ready: press Enter, or Play, to watch it again.
• The toolbar in the Player view has Play, Pause, Stop and Record; Full screen, Own window, Small window, Grid and Always on top; and Screenshot, Keys, History, Teletext, Equaliser, Send to TV.. and Get subtitles. Right-click the picture for the same commands in a menu.
• Press ? over the picture, or Keys on the toolbar, for a card that lists what every key does.

The media keys on a keyboard, and most remote controls for Windows, work in the player while the Player view is showing or something is playing: Play/Pause, Play, Pause, Stop, Next and Previous (next and previous channel), Channel Up and Channel Down, and Volume up, down and mute.

• Move the mouse over the picture and the information strip comes up; it goes again a few seconds after you stop.
• Click a button on the strip to use it.
• On a film, press on the progress bar and drag: the knob follows the mouse, and the film jumps to where you let go. On a live channel you can do the same to go back through what the player has kept, or into the provider's catch-up.
• Click the tag that says how far behind live you are (for example "-2 min") to go back to live.
• Double-click the picture for full screen, and again to leave it. Double-clicking a button, the bar or a card over the picture does not.
• The wheel changes the volume. Over the channel list or the history it moves one row a notch; over a fader of the equaliser it moves that fader.
• Right-click the picture for the player's menu.

When you change channel, move the mouse, or press Enter, a strip fades in along the bottom of the picture for a few seconds. Notices - the track you switched to, the zoom, a recording that started - appear for the same few seconds.

On a live channel the strip shows

• The channel's logo, or its initials when it has none, and its name, with a star when it is a favourite.
• What is on now, from the TV Guide: the title, when it started and ends, its category and how long it still runs.
• Next: what comes after it, with its time.
• The clock, and a tag: LIVE, RADIO for a radio station, PAUSED, or how far behind live you are.
• Badges for what the picture and sound are: SD, HD, FULL HD, 4K or 8K; Dolby Digital or Dolby Digital Plus, or DTS; the speakers (2.0, 5.1, 7.1); and the language of the subtitles on screen, when there are any.
• A progress bar.
• Without a guide, the group and the channel's place in it, for example "News · 12 / 340".

For a film or an episode

For a film the strip shows its poster, its title, the year, the length, the genre and the age rating, the director and the first few actors, the tagline, and a star rating with where it came from. For an episode it shows the series' name, the season and episode (S02E05) with the episode's title, and the story of the episode. Along the foot are the play mark, how far in you are, the progress bar with a tick for each chapter, the full length, and how much is left. The tag says FILM, SERIES or PAUSED.

Rest the pointer on the progress bar and a small box above it says the time at that point, with the chapter's title when you are on one of its ticks. For a file on your computer the box also shows the picture at that moment. For a film from a provider it does so only when the provider's account allows more than one connection at a time, because the picture is fetched over a connection of its own and a second one would otherwise cut off the film you are watching; without that, the box shows the time and the chapter only. The strip stays up while the pointer rests there.

The film details come from TMDB and TVDB when you have entered keys for them under Settings > Databases. Until they answer, or without them, the strip shows the playlist's own name and cover.

For a radio station

A radio station has no picture, so the player shows a card instead: the station's name, the song and the artist it is playing, the album cover when one can be found, and a line with the station's genre and the sound's quality. Covers for songs are looked up in CDDB and MusicBrainz, which needs no account; you can turn that off with "Look music up in CDDB and MusicBrainz" under Settings > Databases.

While the strip is up, a row of buttons runs along its foot. From the left:

• Skip back and Skip on, with the seconds they skip written on them: ten seconds in a film, thirty on a live channel you are watching behind live.
• Play/Pause.
• Go live: only while you are behind live or watching a catch-up programme. It takes you back to the live channel.

From the right:

• Full screen.
• Send to TV.
• Small window (the same as Shift+W).
• Volume: a speaker, which mutes, and a slider to drag.
• Audio: the next sound track.
• Subtitles (films and episodes): the next subtitles, or off.
• Teletext (live channels).
• Record (live channels): the same as R. It stays lit while the player is recording, and pressing it then stops the recording.

A button gets lighter under the mouse pointer, which turns into a hand, and lighter still while you hold it down; it acts when you let go over it. The full screen button is lit while you are in full screen, the teletext button while teletext is up and the speaker while the sound is muted.

The buttons grow and shrink with the picture. In a small window, or when the row would not fit, the least needed ones make way first, in this order: Audio, Subtitles, Teletext, Send to TV, Record, then the volume slider (the speaker stays, to mute with), then Small window, the skip buttons and Full screen. Play/Pause and Go live are always there. With two or four channels on screen there is no button row.

Press C for the list of channels over the left of the picture.

• Every channel with its number, its logo and what the guide says is on now, under the name of its group. The one playing is marked NOW, and favourites carry a star.
• Two tabs at the top: All and Favourites. Left and Right, or a click on a tab, switch between them.
• Up and Down choose a channel, PgUp and PgDn a page, Home and End the first and last. Enter watches it. V marks or unmarks it as a favourite.
• Esc or C closes the list; so does a click beside it. A click on a row plays that channel, and the wheel moves one row at a time.

• V marks the channel or film you are watching as a favourite (in the channel list, the one you have chosen). A notice says "Added to favourites" or "Removed from favourites".
• A favourite has a star on the strip and before its name in the playlist.
• Favourites belong to the playlist they were marked in, and are the same marks the Films and Series views use.
• When you have connected Trakt (Settings > Trakt), marking a film or a series marks it there too.

Press H, or History on the toolbar, for everything you watched, across every playlist.

• Grouped by day: Today, Yesterday, then the date. Each entry says when you watched it, from which playlist, and for a film or an episode how far you got, for example "1 h 12 min of 2 h 5 min".
• Two tabs: All, and Films and series. Left and Right switch between them.
• Enter plays the entry again; a film carries on where you left it. Delete takes an entry out of the history (not out of the playlist). Esc or H closes it. The mouse works as in the channel list.
• An entry from another playlist still plays, by its address.

• A film or an episode starts again where you left it, a few seconds before. Where you are is saved every ten seconds while it plays, and when you stop or change to something else. A film you stopped in the first half minute or the last minute starts from the beginning next time.
• Seeking works in films that come as a file or a direct link. A film served as HLS or DASH plays from the start and cannot be moved through.
• When an episode started from the Series view plays to its end, the next one starts by itself, and the player says "Next episode". Turn this off with "Play the next episode when one ends" on the Playback settings page. An episode you stop part way does not move on.
• Subtitles in a file with the same name as a film on your disk, ending in .srt or .vtt, are loaded with it.
• With "Say what I am watching while it plays" on under Settings > Trakt, films and episodes you watch are reported to Trakt. Live television is never reported.

• A and S step through the sound tracks and the subtitles (Shift goes the other way). The Audio and Subtitles buttons on the strip do the same.
• Set "Preferred sound language" on the Sound settings page and "Preferred subtitle language" on the Subtitles settings page, and every stream starts on those tracks when it has them.
• Subtitles the player can show: text subtitles in MP4 and Matroska files (SubRip, and SSA/ASS shown as plain text), SubRip and WebVTT files beside a film, the picture subtitles and teletext subtitles European broadcasters send, and PGS and VobSub subtitles from Blu-ray and DVD rips in Matroska files.

A film with no subtitles in your language can have them fetched from OpenSubtitles.com.

• Enter your OpenSubtitles key under Settings > Subtitle search, and set a preferred subtitle language on the Subtitles page. Signing in with a user name and password there lets you fetch more subtitles a day.
• Choose Get subtitles on the toolbar or in the right-click menu to look for one now. Or tick "Fetch a missing subtitle while watching", and the player looks by itself when a film does not carry your language.
• "Accept machine and AI translated subtitles" decides whether translated subtitles count.
• The player says "Looking for subtitles", then "Subtitles fetched" or "No subtitles found" with the reason. A subtitle the film carries itself is preferred whenever it turns up.
• This is for films and episodes; a live channel has nothing to look up.

The Subtitles settings page sets the font, the size (50 to 250 percent), the colour (White, Yellow, Cyan, Green or Grey), the outline thickness, a band behind the words, the distance from the edge of the picture, and "Put the subtitles at the top of the picture".

Press K, or Teletext on the toolbar or the strip, for the channel's teletext over the picture. It opens on page 100. The toolbar button is greyed out on a channel that sends no teletext, and many providers remove it from their channels.

The line above the page says which page you are on, the subpage (for example "subpage 2 of 5"), and whether mixed, reveal or hold are on. Text set to flash flashes. While a page is on its way you see "Waiting for the page…"; a page that does not come round within about twelve seconds is "not being broadcast". Teletext is drawn with the accented letters and extra character sets that Czech, Nordic and other services use; anything fancier on a page is shown in its plain form.

Press Q, or Equaliser on the toolbar, for ten bands of tone control across the foot of the picture.

• A Level fader in front, then ten bands from 31 Hz to 16 kHz, each 12 dB up or down.
• Left and Right choose a fader. Up and Down move it 1 dB. 0 sets it back to the middle. R sets every band flat.
• Shift+Left and Shift+Right step through the presets: Flat, Speech, Music, Night, Bass, Treble, Loudness, Classical, Rock, Pop, Jazz and Dance. A shape of your own is called Custom.
• Enter switches the equaliser off and on, so you can hear the difference. Moving a fader switches it on.
• Q or Esc closes it; so does a click beside it. With the mouse, drag a fader, turn the wheel over it, or click the arrows beside the preset's name.
• Other keys keep working while it is open, so you can change channel or the volume while you listen.
• The shape is kept between runs and used for every channel and every picture in the grid. It can also be chosen on the Sound settings page ("Sound shape, whose bands are set over the picture" and "Shape the sound with the equaliser").
• While the sound goes to a receiver undecoded, there is nothing to shape: the card is grey and says "passed through". Nor does the equaliser touch a stream you sent to a television.

• W, or Own window, puts the picture in a window of its own, so you can keep watching while you use the rest of the studio. The window's title is the channel's name, and it opens where you left it last time. Close it, or press W, to bring the picture back to the Player view.
• T, or Always on top, keeps the window with the picture over every other window: the own window when there is one, the studio's otherwise.
• Shift+W, the Small window button or Small window on the toolbar shrinks the own window to a small frameless box in the bottom right corner of the screen, over everything. Drag the picture to move it, and drag an edge or a corner to make it bigger or smaller (it keeps its shape). Shift+W again brings the own window back where it was.
• F, Full screen or a double-click gives the whole screen to the picture. Esc or F brings the window back.

• G, or Grid, puts two channels side by side, then four in a grid, then back to one.
• The framed picture has the sound and the keys. N moves the frame to the next picture; a click on a picture frames that one.
• In a framed picture, Enter opens the channel list for it, Up and Down change its channel, digits pick a channel by number and Space pauses it. An empty picture says "Enter for the channel list".
• The extra pictures have no pause buffer, so pausing and going back work in the first picture only.
• F goes back to one picture and full screen.

P, or Screenshot, saves the picture as it is now as a PNG file, named after the channel with the date and time, in a folder called ERD-Playlist Studio in your Pictures folder.

Playing a locked channel or group asks for the code first, in the Locked window; Unlock opens it. This goes for every way of playing: the player, the channel list, the grid and Send to TV. The code, and how long it lasts once given (Every time, A quarter of an hour, An hour, or Until the studio is closed), are set on the Parental lock settings page.