[Marshall]

The refresh rate for the Settop Box Mode in the PSTV settings increment as 4,8,12 and 24 hours.

Question: What are the allowable hourly increments for the individual channels?

Next question: Am I correct in assuming that the program operates using the following programming flow. PSTV holds its settings in memory and every 4 hours (assuming you picked 4 hours in the settings) an event is triggers to go and examine ALL of the channel xml data. PSTV will then search each channels data for the value of Channel_#_rule_1_opt_1 and then compare it to the channels last reset time Channel_#_SetResetTime. If the time between the last reset time and the time now is greater than your Channel_#_rule_1_opt_1 value a channel data refresh is triggered. Otherwise nothing happens and PSTV goes back to sleep for however many hours you have set in the settings. 4 hours in my example.

It's a two part process, Settop Interval is how often PTVL will check if a channel needs updating.

The advanced channel setting "reset x hours" tells PTVL that the channel needs updating after x hours. So you can set it to update every hour, but PTVL will only check at the min. every four hours...

This is also assuming you are using the "Automatic" time to reset channel setting. If you are not, then PTVL will rebuild every channel, not just the ones with the reset rule, using "every day" you can treat that like you set an advanced rule to reset every 24 hours. If you set "Every time" then Settop will reset all channels on every run...

There is a ton of reasons why it's a bad idea to force PTVL to rebuild all channels in settop mode. Which is why it should be handled on a per channel basis. If you want settop to run how it was designed.

Set "time to reset channel" to automatic, and set a per channel rule on only the channels you want to force updating on.
Remember that PTVL is already smart enough to update channels on its own, no settings required. Settop only "Forces" an update.

For example, In automatic mode, if a channel's playlist is getting old, and you've watched all the shows, PTVL knows and will update the channel before the end of the playlist. No extra rules needed, this is what "automatic" means.
But if you are like me and want the latest shows added to a channel right away without waiting, you would "force" a reset using the advanced "reset every x hours".

"opt_1" isn't the reset rule, it's the rule for renaming a channel, I believe the reset rule is "opt_13"? I don't recommend manually adding advanced rules. Use either PTVL's channel manager or the windows utility. Overall your assumption is correct

Thank you for the detailed explanation. I'm looking to optimize my setup so that PTVL spends as little time updating and fetching data as possible (for all the obvious reasons) while prioritizing the newest media with as few reruns as possible (media library depth permitting).

I notice the windows utility (Psudo TV Live Manager) makes no refrence to the Media limit on type 10, 11, 13 etc channels. Perhaps this is an oversight or that option is no longer applicable to PTVL. I also see you can set a media limit in the settings under the "Tweaks" section in the PTVL settings. Again I assume that the PTVL settings take precedence over the individual channel settings. I would assume, perhaps incorrectly, that if you set the media limit to 100 in the control panel and then add a Channel_#_3 value of 50, the EPG will populate itself with 100 items. I would assume this, but interestingly enough, it doesn't seem to matter what I set in the PTVL control panel. And it doesn't seem to matter if I've set a Channel_#_3 value for the channel to 250 or 1000. PTVL seems to be building the EPG using a max value of 50.

It seems to me the media limit is somewhat obsolete especially when you are running PTVL as a settop box. Unless you are stacking up 25 really short items you're looking at at least 10 hours or more of material before PTVL needs to fetch more data. And of course setting a media limit of 1000 seems absolutely ridiculous unless you don't mind waiting a really long time to build the EPG for what amounts to no good reason.

To make a long story short, I think limiting the media to 25 items per channel is more than adequate in a situation where you run PTVL 24x7x365. Please fill me in on what I'm missing in the settings to make that happen.