Getting Recordings Working?

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Fuzzball

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Getting Recordings Working?

#1

Post by Fuzzball » Sat Jul 08, 2017 4:28 am

The latest Rovi/MS guide data headache left me with a lot of missing guide data as of late and pushed me to finally switch to EPG123. I backed up my series recordings and did a restore after epg123's guide data was in place. I can see the 170+ series from before, but nothing is set to record.

So how do I kick it to start scheduling recordings? I'm not looking forward to manually rebuilding all of that with most of the series not in the guide and on hiatus.

Win8.1 Pro x64. The Install PDF for EPG123 was followed.

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garyan2

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#2

Post by garyan2 » Sat Jul 08, 2017 4:59 am

Series and Individual recording requests are not transferable between Rovi and Gracenote. Everything is based on unique IDs and the 2 sources use different IDs.

That being said, I am currently working on a "converter" to cross-reference a Rovi ID with a Gracenote ID. To build the lookup table, I need both sources to reside in the database at the same time and I will only be able to cover what is in the listings for however much data MS/Rovi can give us at this time. I don't believe I'll be able to cover your 170+ series any time soon.

I recommend deleting all the transferred series recordings (note that wish-lists work) and build what you need now. I'm not guaranteeing anything yet, but the converter looks promising for a future tool. If it works, you can use it to transfer the remaining series.
- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io

Space

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#3

Post by Space » Sat Jul 08, 2017 6:20 am

The ones that are in the guide are the low hanging fruit.

I'm not sure that a tool that only handles these will be enough incentive for people to switch. The hard part is having to wait for the season premieres to appear in the guide before you can recreate the series.

I think if you have a tool that can query Gracenote for the name of the series (and perhaps using some other "hints" like the network the series is on and the DoW the series was created), you might be able to get a fairly accurate match. That is, assuming that Gracenote allows you to query series names and has additional information about the series like the network is it on and the DoW it is normally on, etc. If you are unable to get a high-confidence match, you can ask the user to pick among the candidates. If there is no match at all, then you can just create a list of those for the user to do manually when the series returns to TV (or better yet, let them do their own search within Gracenote to find the series).

You can already do this type of query on zap2it to get the seriesId, but it would probably be against the ToS to have a program do queries such as this.

Fuzzball

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#4

Post by Fuzzball » Sat Jul 08, 2017 3:46 pm

Thanks Gary for the quick reply. I do appreciate your efforts in keeping this platform going. The wish-list seems like a better way to go. Might be a good time to cull anyways.

webminster

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#5

Post by webminster » Sat Jul 08, 2017 5:20 pm

When I did all this a year ago, I put all my "important" series in TheFutonCritic. Gave me a place to remember the series list. Added back the ones in guide in either active showings, or in reruns. The monthly schedule in TFC gave me a way to notice series about to start I cared about. Plus, I occasionally use it the double-check the to-do list on WMC or my TiVo to make sure it's doing what it should.
-Alan

Space

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#6

Post by Space » Sat Jul 08, 2017 6:32 pm

I do the same thing with zap2it. Mark all the series as "My Fave" and then look at "View My Calendar" to look for all the episodes marked "NEW".

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