Guide Data Outage - 2017 Edition

[Blue]

Anaheim, CA. No updates and my EPG is "No Data Available"

ETA: Changed provider from my "Time Warner" HD local provider to the next city "Time Warner" SD privider and guide info downloaded OK - for a limited amount of channels. At least they are the most common channels I record. Weird. Interesting that there is to "Spectrum" option, considering that TW is now Spectrum.. Ah well, at least I have guide info again.

[mafaldatv]

OTA Fresno-Visalia, California. Just looked at my actual listings, good through 4 PM, 14 June. The EPG 'About' end date was 15 June.

I was down to 9 days. Update just finished and for the first time in days showed retrieving timestamped epg files. The 'about' now says what wifiwanderer had several days ago. The search claims 11 days but it is actually 10. Of course that is more than I had a few hours ago.

Something odd seems to be happening and since it seems different for different people, all the worse for fixing.... Charter S. Calif. (Irwindale)

[wifiwanderer]

'About' end date of 16 June. Listings run through 4:30 PM, 15 June. I'm good until listings get down to 2-3 days, then anxiety sets in.

I was down to 9 days. Update just finished and for the first time in days showed retrieving timestamped epg files. The 'about' now says what wifiwanderer had several days ago. The search claims 11 days but it is actually 10. Of course that is more than I had a few hours ago.

Something odd seems to be happening and since it seems different for different people, all the worse for fixing.... Charter S. Calif. (Irwindale)

[WC_Barnstormer]

Same here in SC ED on 6/16 guide data thru 6/15 8:00PM EST. Still updating about every 3 days, sometimes 2. No further information from TIVO, Imagine that! Guide data is getting pretty pathetic also without correct show details.

[Space]

Looks like there was a last minute update of "The Challenge" and "The Challenge: Champs vs. Pros" that are airing on 6/6 at 8pm & 9pm ET on MTV.

Rovi/TiVo screwed up when these listings were first put in the guide, they were both put in as a movie called "The Challenge" starring Jayne Mansfield.

Forget that they are each only one hour and are airing on MTV (which is well known to like to expose it's young audience to movies from the 60's, oh wait, no they're not), but the movie wasn't even released in the US with that title (in the US it was named "It Takes a Thief"). Any one of these clues could have been used to determine that these were not the correct guide listings for this MTV "reality" competition show.

Anyway, back to the "last minute" update... I see on tvguide.com that it is currently fixed. But in WMC it is not. Because of the sporadic guide updates we are currently experiencing it is unlikely to be propagated to WMC before airtime, so manual intervention is required.

[anotheruser]

The latest update was in the last few hours and again contained no new data. Actual end date remains 8 pm EDT June 15.

The time of updates has moved to after 6 am which means our earliest prime time listings are a day staler.

I'm seeing 30-50% of connection attempts to the EPG servers failing. I have not seen any failures during guide data downloads. If it connects, it completes...so far.

Some​ folks may remember the server issue. When it gets really bad, folks start setting up host file entries to direct connections to particular servers that seem to be working. It's not really, really bad yet but thought folks would want to know some updates might be failing due to connection issues too.

[JohnW248]

If you are having trouble getting an updated guide as I was; I have something for you to try. I tried a 'get' latest guide" last night on one machine and got the "downloading guide" message followed by a new message "The guide could not be downloaded, check the MediaCenter Log from the tray Icon" There is no log link in my tray icon but I did do something today after two updates that had normal entries in event viewer but no new data.

Back to DOS

Open an elevated command prompt (if you have a C:\ icon on your start menu, right click it and run as administrator).

This will open C:\Window\sustem32\

type a space and then "CD C:\Windows\ehome"

That will change your path to the Ehome directyory

Now type the following command: "mcupdate.exe -uf -dbgc"

The command -uf will demand a new schedule from the server even if it thinks you have the latest guide (which appears to be the problem) and the -dbgc runs garbage collection (MSFT calls it Client Maintenance and what it does is go through the data base and remove old information and generally clean it up. This process can take a couple of hourse and if you are getting data from the popup on the tray icon it will say "starting" and when finished "completed".

There has been a lot of strange things with the schedule in the past couple of weeks with show names showing the date as the title, also there are problems where the title was wrong (Such as HBO Veep) and you'll have to go to the guide an manually add back Sunday Juen 18th show (it wasn't on yesterday but appeared in the Rovi schedule which made next week's broadcast a repeat and dropped it. Check for other guide errors on series recordings.

[JohnW248]

Updaate: Checking various machines I found one with guide data to June 9 and the rest to June 12. Running the manual command above brought them to June 15.

In addition, last night Spectrum decided to move TCM from Broadcast to Switched which caused recordings to fail over night (they made the switch here around mid-night PDT in So Calif) and they didn't publish the configuration file until 6AM.....

There was one auto update since the manual update on the Dell 9100 but it didn't accrue any additional program data with that update--there may have been none since yesterday afternoon and this morning.

BTW there is an error in my CD command above, you need to add the last "\", i.e. CD C:\windows\ehome\ otherwise the path with not be found...sorry.

[anotheruser]

The latest update this am contains 3 days of new data. Actual schedule data now ends at 8 pm EDT June 18.

Still seeing some connection failures but less than yesterday.

[mafaldatv]

The latest update this am contains 3 days of new data. Actual schedule data now ends at 8 pm EDT June 18.

For the several years that I've been using WMC all guide updates have occurred by about 6:50am Pacific. Though WMC seems to 'retry' at night, it never has been updated. There was no new data this morning but after reading anotheruser's post I forced an update in the afternoon. I now have the same data as anotheruser.

Anybody notice this behavior? Has the update time slid past 7am pacific?

[Space]

The update I got today was dated 6/6/2017 6:22 AM EDT and added 3 more days of listings (guide data ends 6/18 @ 8pm EDT).

[anotheruser]

...
Anybody notice this behavior? Has the update time slid past 7am pacific?[/quote]

The update time has moved a bunch of times. It's changed at last 3 times in the last month. The current time after 7 am EDT means our earliest prime time listings are a day staler than when we were getting them around 5 pm.

[Octavean]

Open an elevated command prompt (if you have a C:\ icon on your start menu, right click it and run as administrator).

This will open C:\Window\sustem32\

type a space and then "CD C:\Windows\ehome"

That will change your path to the Ehome directyory

Now type the following command: "mcupdate.exe -uf -dbgc"

Thanks for posting this.

This seemed to have corrected a troublesome recurring problem whereby immediately after the resumption of most if not all guide outages my main Media Center system would only download partially complete guide data. More specifically the local affiliate channels for all sources (ATSC, CableCard and Hauppauge HD PVR via Cable Box) such as CBS, NBC, ABC and so on were missing. Guide data for all other cable cable channels were fine.

The only way I could find to correct this was to run objectstorerecovery which more often then not would require setting up Media Center again for live TV.

Once again, Thank you!

[anotheruser]

The last two updates have become available before midnight EDT so it looks like the updates shifted 6+ hours earlier.

These last two daily updates have no new data so actual schedule info still ends 8 pm EDT June 18.

[anotheruser]

Latest update has 3 days of new data taking us to June 21 8 pm EDT.

and it continues to lurch along...

[adam1991]

Latest update has 3 days of new data taking us to June 21 8 pm EDT.

and it continues to lurch along...

[anotheruser]

Today's update was available before 9 pm EDT but contains no new data.

[Space]

Prior update was made available on 6/9 @ 7:30pm EDT. Just downloaded an update that was made available on 6/11 @ 1:31am EDT and it had a new file size and new data (listings now end 6/23 @ 8pm EDT).

So it looks like the availability time is moving all around. I hope this means that they are working on the problem and stopping/restarting the process after making a fix (which I assume causes the change in availability times). Or it could just be that they are not really doing any fixes and just stopping/starting the process and hoping it fixes it.

[adam1991]

Prior update was made available on 6/9 @ 7:30pm EDT. Just downloaded an update that was made available on 6/11 @ 1:31am EDT and it had a new file size and new data (listings now end 6/23 @ 8pm EDT).

So it looks like the availability time is moving all around. I hope this means that they are working on the problem and stopping/restarting the process after making a fix (which I assume causes the change in availability times). Or it could just be that they are not really doing any fixes and just banging their heads against the wall again and again and expecting different results.

Fixed that one for you.

[wifiwanderer]

Have noticed occasional EPG schedule errors, less than 1 or 2 a month among shows I record. Most recently, NBC network evening news was listed at 2 different times for yesterday. The show actually only aired, once, at the later scheduled time. A minor annoyance, because as a news junkie, I keep up with current events using a wide variety of sources, here and abroad over the Net.