Media Center EPG: Series Recording Issues

Global guide related discussion. All Windows versions.
gary94080

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#21

Post by gary94080 » Mon Jul 27, 2015 6:09 am

some daily series programs seem to be coming back automatically starting on Aug 4th.

so maybe the problem has been fixed but was not done for data that was already in the system.

Space

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#22

Post by Space » Mon Jul 27, 2015 7:54 am

Yes it has, I mentioned that in the last sentence of my post.

Mike88

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#23

Post by Mike88 » Mon Jul 27, 2015 8:45 am

gary94080 wrote:some daily series programs seem to be coming back automatically starting on Aug 4th.

so maybe the problem has been fixed but was not done for data that was already in the system.
I had a daily series that stopped recording but started appearing again in the guide on Aug 5th. However is was not retro active. IOW the missed days that were in the guide were still missed & had to be set to record.

Other than the first 2 days of Rovi, all the other episodes for that series have no title & all have the same generic description.

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#24

Post by Space » Mon Jul 27, 2015 9:00 am

Again, if you read my post, I mentioned that as well. I think maybe I don't write very clearly :-(.

gary94080

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#25

Post by gary94080 » Mon Jul 27, 2015 3:26 pm

Space wrote:Again, if you read my post, I mentioned that as well. I think maybe I don't write very clearly :-(.
sorry, yes I missed that.

with this EPG-Rovi issue, lately it means skimming pages and pages of posts looking for information.

I am not a writer but I will pass on a phrase that I learned in school, "burying the lead".

anything important should be as high as possible in an article and if possible leading a paragraph or in its own paragraph.

rakosnik

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#26

Post by rakosnik » Tue Jul 28, 2015 3:37 pm

This seems like a very strange, inconsistent bug. This has affected some series and not others. There doesn't seem to be any pattern I can figure out. As mentioned above some of the daily series affected seem to come back around August 4th, but not all. I am aware of at least 5 series that have been affected for me: Olbermann (Daily/ESPN), Pardon the Interruption (Daily/ESPN), Highly Questionable (Daily/ESPN), Dark Matter (Weekly/SyFy), Humans (Weekly/AMC).

The series program for Highly Questionable looks like it is going to work again starting on August 4th. However, Pardon the Interruption, which is also a daily show on the same channel, has yet to have its series program begin to work again.

The series Olbermann has since concluded. This show was frequently bumped when sporting events such as Wimbledon or a golf tournament conflicted with its schedule air time. So when I didn't record it for a few days I didn't think any of it. However, this bug caused me to miss the last couple episodes of this show. :thumbdown:

Dark Matter is weekly show on Syfy. But other Weekly shows that I record on Syfy continue to have their series recordings work. Some of those shows are even on the same night. Luckily I noticed that it wasn't scheduled to be recorded prior to missing an episode.

Humans has had a number of strange things happen with it. Again I have other weekly programs on AMC with series recordings that have continued to work while this one wasn't scheduled to work. I also noticed this in time to setup an individual recording for episodes, so I didn't miss a recording. However, this last week the show's name Humans was all capitalized as HUMANS. I don't know if this is part of this issue or not. MCEBuddy also had trouble numbering this most recent episode. This last week was the 5th episode in the United States. MCEBuddy numbered it as episode 7. According to epguides.com episode 7 was originally aired this Sunday the same day episode 5 aired here in the United States. I'm guessing this is because Humans might air two weeks earlier in the United Kingdom :?:

I also think it is worth mentioning that both Dark Matter and Humans are new series that don't have individual episode names. I hope that is not a new trend that continues and I don't know if that has anything to do with this bug.

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#27

Post by Space » Wed Jul 29, 2015 1:29 am

There are two different issues that occurred with Series due to the Rovi switch.

1. Some Series stop working (but only for episodes from the new Rovi data, usually the ones airing after July 27th) due to (most likely) a new unique series identifier that is used by Rovi. Most of my Series continued to work, but some had a new unique ID for some reason, so they stopped working.

2. There was an issue with Rovia data causing Series that should have recorded daily (as opposed to weekly) to only record one episode and then consider all episodes after that as a repeat of that first episode.

For issue #1, you can tell if your Series will continue to work or not by bringing up the details of an episode of that show from the guide (use an episode later in the guide to make sure it was one that was from Rovi data, and not one of the ones that was downloaded from zap2it) and look to see if the "cancel series" option is available. If it is available, then your Series is good and there is no need to do anything.

If instead it says "record series" (even though you already have a Series for that show) then you will have to create a new Series in order to record the episodes that were learned from Rovi data (as opposed to the episodes that may be set to record which were learned from zap2it data). After creating the new Series, you will have TWO Series for the same show, one will record the zap2it episodes and the other will record the Rovi episodes. Once the zap2it Series has no more episodes to record, you can delete this Series, and just keep the one Series for the new Rovi data (which should record all new episodes gong forward).

For issue #2, the problem has been corrected by Microsoft and Rovi. So any NEW data coming from Rovi will be correct, but you will still have to deal with the old data that did not have the correct flags set to mark a daily episode as NEW. Just set up a single record "single red dot" on each of the daily episodes that should be recorded, up until you see that the Series has started working again (which should be on August 4th, the day for which they started sending the corrected data).
Note that even for a daily Series, you may still have to deal with issue #1 first, so make sure the later episodes in the guide have "cancel series" before resolving issue #2.
Last edited by Space on Wed Jul 29, 2015 1:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

hansolo89

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#28

Post by hansolo89 » Wed Jul 29, 2015 1:40 am

this is fixed, no issues anymore

gary94080

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#29

Post by gary94080 » Wed Jul 29, 2015 5:56 am

hansolo89 wrote:this is fixed, no issues anymore
almost. some daily programs that are shown live on the east coast and repeated on the same channel three hours later for the west coast are also listed for recording.

so until this gets resolved we will need to manually delete the second showing. (yes, I have it set up for new only)

hansolo89

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#30

Post by hansolo89 » Wed Jul 29, 2015 6:03 am

gary94080 wrote:
hansolo89 wrote:this is fixed, no issues anymore
almost. some daily programs that are shown live on the east coast and repeated on the same channel three hours later for the west coast are also listed for recording.

so until this gets resolved we will need to manually delete the second showing. (yes, I have it set up for new only)
can't you just go to advanced recordings and specify certain shows to record airtime around 8am as an example

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#31

Post by Space » Wed Jul 29, 2015 2:49 pm

hansolo89 wrote:
gary94080 wrote:
hansolo89 wrote:this is fixed, no issues anymore
almost. some daily programs that are shown live on the east coast and repeated on the same channel three hours later for the west coast are also listed for recording.

so until this gets resolved we will need to manually delete the second showing. (yes, I have it set up for new only)
can't you just go to advanced recordings and specify certain shows to record airtime around 8am as an example
The issue with both the east coast and the west coast airing being scheduled to record is not a new problem for me, it even happened with zap2it data from time to time. I noticed it happening when the two airings first appeared in the guide without episode specific data, and then was later updated. It would continue to have both episodes set to record, even if they were changed to be the same episode.

As for setting the show to record at a specific time, I would advise against using this option generally, since it only looks within 15 minutes (for WMC on Win7) of the "around" time for the start time of the show, if the show is normally on at 9pm (and that is the time you set for it to record around), but for one week the show instead starts at 8pm (for instance, for a special 2 hour episode), you will not get anything recorded.

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DavidinCT

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#32

Post by DavidinCT » Wed Jul 29, 2015 2:50 pm

I was running into this problem too on Daily news (record every day but, keep just 1), on the 8/5 it seems to be starting up again so, looks like it was fixed.

I used a script where it cleans out all guide data and re-downloads it and that did not change. So, the updated data starts next week.
-Dave
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Windows Media Center certified and WMC MVP 2010 - 2012

Space

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#33

Post by Space » Wed Jul 29, 2015 3:39 pm

DavidinCT wrote:...
I used a script where it cleans out all guide data and re-downloads it and that did not change. So, the updated data starts next week.
I would like to have this script, can you post it?

Thanks!

bartman01

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#34

Post by bartman01 » Fri Jul 31, 2015 1:36 am

As far as I can tell, this is still broken for all racing series. Several series are all listed as just 'Auto Racing' and can only be recorded individually (no 'series' options), it was listed like that before under Zap2It but you could do a 'series' record and then just delete the ones you didn't want to watch. Even the series with their own series title are not working.

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#35

Post by cKuR6 » Sun Aug 02, 2015 10:16 pm

I agree, my news and auto racing are still screwy, seems like 8/5 might correct the news. As listed earlier by another, caps HUMANS seems to be ready to start recording again tonight.

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#36

Post by nikleb » Wed Aug 05, 2015 2:22 am

Also encountering all kinds of strange behavior. I also found some show names that changed just slightly. e.g. some BBC news variations with world or without and so on. For those I started recreating the series recording.

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#37

Post by Haba » Wed Aug 05, 2015 4:35 am

Sorry to hear of your woes. I am surprised more people are not seeing and posting about guide data issues. Are we the only users affected? The Rovi guide data stinks. Multiple missing episode descriptions replaced with a generalized descriptions of the show. The data is NOT updated to fix this problem either. Last night I saw the recorder recording AMC for a completely different show because the guide was wrong. I have never seen this level of incomplete and wrong guide data from Zap2it. How do I switch providers?

Mike88

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#38

Post by Mike88 » Wed Aug 05, 2015 6:04 am

Haba wrote:Sorry to hear of your woes. I am surprised more people are not seeing and posting about guide data issues. Are we the only users affected? The Rovi guide data stinks.
People are posting here.
http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... f=5&t=9026

GE01

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#39

Post by GE01 » Fri Aug 07, 2015 3:02 am

As English Premier League fans know, the season starts this weekend. In the past at the beginning of each season i have recorded the series and WMC records all of the games. When i went to record the new season, The "record series" option did not exist. It wasn't grayed out, it just wasn't there. I had to go in and individually record the 5 games available for the weekend. The game information was there showing team names so I think the unique information is available to WMC. I looked at other programs and the series recording option is there and works fine. This appears to be the only "series" that i can't record.

I'm in NY using FIOS and have had to reset some of my series recording for the Rovi changeover, but this one has me stumped.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

[Moderator note: topic merged]

micdousmi

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#40

Post by micdousmi » Fri Aug 07, 2015 1:22 pm

I am trying to record the season/series 'Barclays Premier League Soccer' and the option for 'record series' is not available. Is this related to this 'Rovi' issue I am seeing?
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[Moderator note: topic merged]

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