HOW TO: Lock playlists and playback controls

Lock/Unlock the playback controls ?

In OnTheAir Video and OnTheAir Video Express, you can lock the playback controls of a playlist. To do that, you just have to click on the lock button that is located at the top of the playlist:

As soon as you click on this button, you will see that the playback controls are greyed out. Here is how it looks like when the playback controls are unlocked:

And when they are locked:

What does it do ?

This lock has been added to the user interface so you are sure that you do not start playing back a clip or stop the playback inadvertently simply by hitting the space bar when you don't want to for example. So it is a safeguard. 

Here are what you can NOT do when the playback controls are enabled:

• you can not use any of the playback controls (either by pushing the buttons, using the mouse or keyboard shortcuts). This is true for all playlists, so it's a global settings.
• you can not edit the playlist that is currently playing. But you can edit any of the playlists that are not playing. This is done by design so you can still create and edit playlists when something is playing in another one. But at least you are sure that the currently playing playlist is "locked". Note that if you need to move clips from the playing playlist to another, you can simply do a copy/paste (drag and drop won't work).

Note that by default when using the scheduler, the playback controls are locked. So if you want to modify a playlist, you'll have to unlock first.

What about the "Lock" that appears on clips

This is totally unrelated. This grey lock shows up when the next clip is already "buffered". Our playout engine has a 10 seconds buffer so if your playlist is in chain mode and it remains only 10 seconds to play, the next clip will already be buffered and thus you won't be able to move it. This grey lock looks like this (on the second clip):