Not sure if anybody noticed, but in the latest version we added support for restricting a named client to only see certain channels and/or recordings. This came up in this thread when someone wanted to lockdown their child's XBMC installation to not show "adult" channels. It could also be useful to present a subset of core/frequently watched channels to a lower powered device such as a raspberry pi to help with it's grid rendering time or several other scenarios which ive listed a few ideas at the end of this post.
To enable the feature you need to do it in the config file with notepad
Enable the Client Restriction processing:
Code:
<ClientRestrictionEnabled>true</ClientRestrictionEnabled>
Add your restrictions in the ClientRestrictions list.
One entry per client.
Case sensitivity does not matter for client name or channel group name.
Set the behaviour for Channels and Recordings separately.
Acceptable values are
- Unrestricted (no filtering occurs)
- RestrictToGroups (only show channels or recordings from the specified groups)
- RestrictAll (filter out all channels or recordings).
Specify the channel group/s (only applicable when Channel or Recording behaviour is set to "RestrictToGroups").
Example:
Code:
<ClientRestrictions>
<ClientRestriction>
<Client>DummyClient</Client>
<RestrictChannels>RestrictToGroups</RestrictChannels>
<RestrictRecordings>Unrestricted</RestrictRecordings>
<Groups>DummyGroup1,DummyGroup2</Groups>
</ClientRestriction>
</ClientRestrictions>
This will restrict "DummyClient" to only see channels in the channel list that are part of "DummyGroup1" or "DummyGroup2". No restrictions are in place for recordings, so the complete list of recordings are shown to this client.
Using these flexible settings you could do lots of things
- Allow a client to view some channels but see NO recordings
- Restrict a childs client to only show kids channels and the recordings from those kids channels
- Restrict an XBMC to only show recordings and not allow any liveTV viewing
- Restrict a low powered client to only view a handful of commonly used channels
- Restrict a low powered client to only show recordings from some channels
If anyone makes use of this feature, please provide feedback!