OtrkeyFinder has a new owner. Clipland GmbH finished transition of all OtrkeyFinder assets on 15.05.2020 0:00h. The intention is reliable operation, keeping the site working as expected and continued delivery of up-to-date relevant search results to a loyal userbase. The move was not without bumps and we thank all users for their patience and helpful feedback.

As the very recent move of the "News" section from header into footer might already imply: from now on, there will be occasional changes and updates to the site - but without elaborate notices in a news bulletin. Focus will lie on optimizing and slightly expanding services here on OtrkeyFinder - without changing the core of what users have come to expect and love. But as so many things were done over the past few weeks already, here's a short excerpt of what changed:

• Top navigation with less clutter for less distraction. Base layout is now 70 pixels wider for a more appropriate fit to modern displays while maintaining the traditional OtrkeyFinder layout. Accessibility on mobile devices has been improved by implementing at least basic mobile conventions into HTML and CSS.
• "Top Shows" start page has a new "Options"-button that displays the current view mode right away.
• Search input has no "radio buttons" anymore - instead a similar button to "Top Shows" is used now, to toggle between sort modes.
• A second pagination bar slides out at the bottom of each search results page once a click on one of the mirrors has expanded the page vertically.
• Filesize preview has been restored and offers size hints on many otrkey files.
• "Serien-API" has been retired.
• Donations have been retired and will be replaced with an advertising based revenue model.
• All search results are now subscribable via RSS Feed, without the need for a login and without any limitation in maximum number of subscribed searches. This feature replaces the now retired "only for registered users" Atom Feed. (More about RSS)
• Every search results page now offers an "explain"-link, a tool that helps to understand currently displayed search results and how search works in general. (More about "explain" here)
• An Electronic Program Guide (EPG). Based on the database of available broadcast recordings, OtrkeyFinder compiles daily TV Listings - always starting with yesterday and for up to two years into the past. For OnlineTvRecorder users, this is a very complete library of TV shows and films, sourced and compiled from receivable TV stations, an intuitive way of discovering recordings on OtrkeyFinder but even more a way to browse TV broadcasts in the context of their original programming schedule.

As you may have already noticed: OtrkeyFinder.com will move to a new owner. Since each user account contains an email address, each user account will only be moved to the new owner if the user explicitly agreed on that. If you want to move your user account to the new owner, you can now change the appropriate setting in your user account until the 10th of May 2020. If you do not agree your user account will be deleted when the website moves to the new owner.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your feedback, your suggestions and of course for your financial support. And I have a Christmas present for you :-) From now on you can get the search results for your saved search terms (in your user account) as a feed. So your feed reader can notify you as soon as an otrkey-file is available on a mirror for download.

(as of 2020, this is not how search works anymore)
From now on, search terms containing underscores are no longer split. For example, a search for "Minority_Report_15." was split into 3 terms before: "Minority_ _Report_ _15.". This could lead to unexpected results. Now a search for "Minority_Report_15." finds only those files containing the exact search term.

Moreover you can now search for an exact tv show. A search for "TVSHOW=X" finds only tv shows with the exact title (the part in the filename before the date) "X". For example a search for "Liebe" finds all tv shows that contain the word "Liebe", but a search for "TVSHOW=Liebe" finds only tv shows that matches the exact title "Liebe".

The poll for the new design of the search results has ended. I thank all 396 participants for their votes.

Design B5 has won the vote. You will see the new design in the search results from now on. The results of the poll can be found here (link removed).

I was pointed to the fact that the new search result page looks somehow noisier than the old version. So I decided to create a few new designs with different text- and border-colors.

I created a poll for this topic: Which design should be used in the future? The designs split up in two groups (A and B):
Group B puts otrkeys that belong to the same tv show more together, which results in less horizontal lines.
Both groups contain designs with 5 different color schemes (1 to 5) while color scheme 5 is a combination of the color schemes 3 and 4.
A1 is the current design. A picture paints a thousand words. Here you can find the poll: (link removed). Thanks in advance for your vote!

Just in time for the 9.685-th birthday the fourth version of OtrkeyFinder.com is now online!

What has changed?
Well, first of all the design. I hope most of you noticed this ;-) But most importantly the website was totally rebuilt from scratch. I tried to implement all wishes you send to me. However due to limited time and incompatibilities some of them could not be realized. How is the search affected by the new website?
First of all the underscore is not treated as whitespace anymore. In OtrkeyFinder version 3 a search for zdf_ returned recordings from ZDFInfo, ZDFNeo etc.. Now only recordings are found that contain zdf_ in the filename. However this would also find the following file which was aired on Phoenix, not ZDF: "ZDF_History_15.09.23_03-45_phoenix_45_TVOON_DE.mpg.mp4.otrkey". But now you can also limit the search to the station, for example: STATION=zdf. The same is true for searches for a specific file format, for example searching for FORMAT=mpg.HQ.avi returns only HQ-files.
You can also exclude search terms now. For example a search for Sting finds recordings that contain the word "Casting". If you want to exclude files that contain the word "Casting" then you can prefix the search term with a dash, for example: Sting -Casting. This is different to the old behavior: in version 3 you could search for -15 to find recordings that were aired at XX:15. Now the same search request would find files that do not contain "15". To overcome this you can surround the search term with quotes: "-15". You can combine the previous mentioned options.
For example you can search for Gotham "-10" -FORMAT=mpg.mp4 to find files that contain "Gotham" and "-10" but not the MP4-version.
Changes for registered users
Mirrors can not be rated anymore: most users did not adhere to the rules and there were also accusations that mirror admins were rating their own mirrors. Now users can add mirrors to their favorite lists. These favorite mirrors are shown on top in the search results. Thus the old mirror-blacklist does not exist anymore.
Due to these changes the terms of use were adapted. You can find the new terms of use in your user account page.
Browser-Support
Old browsers like the Internet Explorer 6 to 8 are not supported anymore. The website might still be usable (with limitations) but I recommend using a more recent browser-version. I prefer Chrome/Chromium or FireFox as web browser.
Donations
At this point I want to thank all donors for the financial support. I wanted to disable the ads for the donors but I noticed that most donors use different email-addresses for their PayPal- and OtrkeyFinder-account. So if you are a donor, then you can send me an email (from you PayPal-address) which includes your OtrkeyFinder-username. Then I can disable ads for you for some months.
These were the biggest changes. You might find one or two more things that are new :-)
Happy Online TV Recording!