Scheduled recordings

A scheduled recording starts “Record now” on a channel by itself at the chosen time — once, daily or on certain days of the week — and stops it at the end. Each run becomes an ordinary clip (see Clips): download it, send it to S3 (automatically too) or show it with a viewing link. It also works on channels without an archive.

Available from Castreon 1.6.0, in the Pro and Enterprise plans (the same licence as clips).

New schedule

Operations → Clips → Scheduled tab → New schedule:

1. The channel and the title (e.g. “Evening news”). Clips get the title plus the date and time: “Evening news — 2026-10-14 20:00”.
2. When:
   • Once — the start date and time (in browser time);
   • Daily — the time;
   • Weekly — the time and the days (e.g. Monday–Friday).
3. The show length, in minutes.
4. The margins: Start earlier (up to 30 minutes) and Stop later (up to 60 minutes). Broadcasts often run a few minutes late — a small margin after saves you cut-off endings. Length including margins: at most 6 hours.
5. Keep clips: “until you delete them” or 7 / 14 / 30 / 90 / 365 days — older clips of this schedule are deleted automatically.

Daily and weekly times use the instance time zone (Settings → Instance), shown on the page: “daily 20:00” stays 20:00 across daylight-saving changes.

From the TV guide

On the channel page, Schedule tab: every upcoming show has a Record button. The dialog comes filled in with the show's title and times, with margins of 1 minute before and 3 minutes after; you can change them.

What happens at the start time

• The channel must be running and have an HLS output (as for “Record now”).
• If the channel is stopped or has no HLS yet at the start time, Castreon retries every 30 seconds until the end of the window and records what is left. If it cannot start at all, the run shows as Missed, with the reason.
• If a recording started by hand is already running on the channel, it is not stopped — the schedule waits and starts right after it.
• Two schedules on the same channel cannot overlap: when saving you get the other one's name and time. If only the margins touch (back-to-back shows), the one that starts stops the previous one at its time.
• After a server restart, recordings in progress continue; a run that should have started while the server was down starts immediately if there is still time, otherwise it shows as Missed (“the node was down”).

List and history

The Scheduled tab shows for each schedule: when it runs, the next run, the last run (Waiting for channel, Recording, Recorded, Missed with the reason) and how long clips are kept. Buttons: History (the latest runs), pause / resume, edit, delete. Below, the Next 7 days by day.

In Clips, clips made by a schedule carry the Scheduled label. Deleting a schedule does not delete the clips already made.

Notifications

In Settings → Notifications there is the Scheduled recordings family (on by default): you get a message when a scheduled recording cannot start (channel stopped, no HLS), so you can act while there is still time — and another when it starts after all.

API

/api/v1/recording-schedules (create, list, change, delete), /upcoming and /{id}/runs — see API.