No forthcoming programmes in this series

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IT Troll

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No forthcoming programmes in this series

#1

Post by IT Troll » Wed Mar 21, 2018 11:47 pm

This is very weird. I updated to 1.1.24 at the weekend and since then none of my existing series recordings are functioning.

They are all still listed but state that “There are no forthcoming programmes in this series”. EPG123 is updating fine with no errors in the log. The guide itself looks perfect, search etc. is working fine. If I create a new series recording then that does correctly show the upcoming shows and schedule the recordings. As far as I can tell the channel and series IDs are identical.

I’m completely baffled why the existing series are suddenly failing to match. :crazy:
I guess the answer is to recreate them.
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#2

Post by garyan2 » Thu Mar 22, 2018 12:08 am

Well that's not good. This is the third report of this happening though yours is the only one that impacted ALL of your series recordings.

What version did you upgrade from? Pretty much all my changes for quite a while have been about adding features and nothing to do with the MXF file generation or import. I'm confused on how epg123 could cause this behavior.

viewtopic.php?p=125929#p125929
viewtopic.php?p=125951#p125951
viewtopic.php?p=125990#p125990
- Gary
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#3

Post by IT Troll » Thu Mar 22, 2018 12:21 am

Ah, I didn't see those. I upgraded from 1.1.19 straight to 1.1.24.

I slightly exaggerated when I said none. Two series did actually still manage to find a match. But it was such a small percentage of the expected recordings, I classed it is practically all.

I note iankb is also based in the UK. I wonder if this is a SD issue linked in some way to other changes viewtopic.php?f=99&t=11571

Just happened to be poor timing for your release.
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#4

Post by garyan2 » Thu Mar 22, 2018 12:53 am

IT Troll wrote:I note iankb is also based in the UK. I wonder if this is a SD issue linked in some way to other changes viewtopic.php?f=99&t=11571.
I'm doing a quick compare between the source for .19 and .24 and the only thing that jumped out was related to this. On all version prior to v1.1.21, I simply used the common name for the language of the program ... "English". A long time ago I realized that WMC could take the 2-character and the 2-character plus locality codes for the language (en, en-GB) in that language field and display them properly. In v1.1.21 I started using the code+locality.

When creating a series recording from an episode, the language of that episode becomes the "prototypicalLanguage" of the series request. I'm wondering if in your case, when you set up the series the language was "English" but the programs are all now "English (Great Britain)". Could you go back to v1.1.19 and do an update ... see if the scheduled recordings get restored.

EDIT: Sorry... was in a hurry. I'm wondering if the different language code is preventing WMC from considering the programs as part of the requested series.
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#5

Post by IT Troll » Thu Mar 22, 2018 1:43 am

I think you have nailed it. I haven't rolled back, but looking at the XML I can see:

The two which are still working do not specify a language; prototypicalLanguage=""

The broken ones specify; prototypicalLanguage="English " (yes with a space after)

The new .24 ones specify; prototypicalLanguage="en-GB"

Anyway, it is late here, time for bed. Here's an example:

Code: Select all

 <SeriesRequest prototypicalProgram="!Program!EP02903433_0001" prototypicalService="!Service!EPG123_78995" channel="0000A" creationTime="2018-02-23T19:46:13.7700536Z" sourceName="" complete="false" prototypicalStartTime="2018-03-01T00:15:00Z" prototypicalDuration="PT35M" prototypicalLanguage="English " prototypicalTitle="Film 2018" prototypicalIsHdtv="true" prototypicalChannelNumber="101" anyChannel="false" anyLanguage="false" contentQualityPreference="0" scheduleLimit="0" tooManyScheduled="false" sourceTypeFilter="" prePaddingRequired="PT0S" prePaddingRequested="PT2M" postPaddingRequired="PT0S" postPaddingRequested="PT5M" keepLength="-1" quality="0" isRecurring="false" recordingLimit="-1" runType="0" anyTime="true" dayOfWeekMask="127" airtime="PT0S" airtimeValid="false">
    <priorityToken priority="137216" />
    <series uid="!Series!02903433" title="Film 2018" shortTitle="" description="The latest film reviews, news and interviews." shortDescription="" studio="" startAirdate="0001-01-01T00:00:00Z" endAirdate="0001-01-01T00:00:00Z" year="0" />
  </SeriesRequest>
  <SeriesRequest prototypicalProgram="!Program!EP02903433_0004" prototypicalService="!Service!EPG123_78995" channel="0000A" series="!Series!02903433" creationTime="2018-03-21T21:54:02.9029679Z" sourceName="" complete="false" prototypicalStartTime="2018-03-22T00:15:00Z" prototypicalDuration="PT30M" prototypicalLanguage="en-GB" prototypicalTitle="Film 2018" prototypicalIsHdtv="true" prototypicalChannelNumber="101" anyChannel="false" anyLanguage="false" contentQualityPreference="1" scheduleLimit="0" tooManyScheduled="false" sourceTypeFilter="" prePaddingRequired="PT0S" prePaddingRequested="PT2M" postPaddingRequired="PT0S" postPaddingRequested="PT5M" keepLength="-1" quality="0" isRecurring="false" recordingLimit="-1" runType="1" anyTime="true" dayOfWeekMask="127" airtime="PT0S" airtimeValid="false">
    <priorityToken priority="138240" />
  </SeriesRequest>
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#6

Post by Space » Thu Mar 22, 2018 1:54 am

If the same series airs in two different languages, are they each given a unique seriesId or do they use the same one and rely on the language code to distinguish? If it is the same seriesId, then I would think that the language code may be the problem here.

It appears if the Series has prototypicalLanguage="English" it will not record the show if it is "en-GB".

I wonder if the Series has prototypicalLanguage="en" if it would still match "en-GB", or vice versa.

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#7

Post by garyan2 » Thu Mar 22, 2018 6:14 am

@Space
Kind of a moot exercise now. I have reverted the program language values back to how they were prior to v1.1.20. This will restore any series recordings broken by this interesting quirk in WMC.

I believe MS intent was to be able to have multiple instances of an episode in different languages while using the same unique ID. Requiring the language value to match makes sense to ensure the proper episodes are recorded. What doesn't make sense is if a series recording was created by using the title search, none of those prototypical fields are populated and therefore would not fall into this trap.

@IT Troll
I'm not sure where the extra space is coming from ... I couldn't recreate that here. Hopefully the trailing space won't stop v1.1.25 from working for you and restoring all your scheduled episodes.

Interesting note: none of my recordings were affected so evidently "en" == "English"; most of IT Troll's recordings were affected so "en-GB" != "English".
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#8

Post by Space » Thu Mar 22, 2018 8:27 am

garyan2 wrote:...
I believe MS intent was to be able to have multiple instances of an episode in different languages while using the same unique ID. Requiring the language value to match makes sense to ensure the proper episodes are recorded. What doesn't make sense is if a series recording was created by using the title search, none of those prototypical fields are populated and therefore would not fall into this trap.
...
I see, so it looks like setting a Series recording by using a search will record the show regardless of the specified language of the episode, and creating a Series from an episode will only record episodes that match the language of that source episode.

I wonder if your problems in the past were caused by the language being incorrect on some of the episodes. Or perhaps one of the other data (prototypical?) fields is also used to determine a unique series? I wonder what difference (if anything) an anyLanguage="true" setting in the series backup files makes. Not that it makes much difference, since it seems that it might be set true on search-based Series and false on episode-based Series with no way to change the default (unless there is some setting I don't know about).

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#9

Post by IT Troll » Thu Mar 22, 2018 9:40 am

garyan2 wrote:I'm not sure where the extra space is coming from ... I couldn't recreate that here. Hopefully the trailing space won't stop v1.1.25 from working for you and restoring all your scheduled episodes.
Many thanks. v1.1.25 + a run of PvrSchedule has restored the scheduled episodes.

Strangely, the couple of series I added under .24 were still working OK. I am not sure if this is down to some weird language localisation logic, or if it just takes a while for existing series/recordings to be re-evaluated. I've removed and re-added them to be safe.

We hit a similar issue to this in the early days with the descriptionLanguage; viewtopic.php?p=108615#p108615

So it would seem that these language locale strings are somewhat problematic. It is odd that your code doesn't become en-US.
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#10

Post by Space » Thu Mar 22, 2018 10:43 am

IT Troll wrote:
garyan2 wrote:I'm not sure where the extra space is coming from ... I couldn't recreate that here. Hopefully the trailing space won't stop v1.1.25 from working for you and restoring all your scheduled episodes.
...

Strangely, the couple of series I added under .24 were still working OK. I am not sure if this is down to some weird language localisation logic, or if it just takes a while for existing series/recordings to be re-evaluated. I've removed and re-added them to be safe.
...
If you added the Series via the "Search" method then they should work regardless of the version you are using.
But if you added them by viewing a specific episode and then selecting "Record Series", and they still work after installing the latest release, then it may be some WMC magic going on there...

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#11

Post by IT Troll » Thu Mar 22, 2018 2:12 pm

Space wrote:But if you added them by viewing a specific episode and then selecting "Record Series", and they still work after installing the latest release, then it may be some WMC magic going on there...
This one. Must be a kind of magic. Or it just takes Media Center a while to re-evaluate the schedule.
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#12

Post by garyan2 » Thu Mar 22, 2018 2:42 pm

Space wrote:If you added the Series via the "Search" method then they should work regardless of the version you are using.
There's a caveat to this. The search method will only have empty prototypical values if there are more than 1 episode in the results. If there is only a single episode in the search result, then it is the same as using the specific episode.
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#13

Post by Sancho » Thu Mar 22, 2018 3:16 pm

Not sure if this info will be useful, but I'll report it.

A series set before I'd installed 1.21 had stopped showing upcoming recordings after upgrading to 1.21, and recently 1.24. After installing 1.25, running Save & Execute, then rebooting, I checked the scheduled recordings and two or three for that show which were not there a couple days ago are now scheduled to record. This show is on Washington, DC's "UK" PBS station. So there's that.

Also, a History Channel series I set up while 1.21/1.24 was installed recorded a couple episodes successfully, had a new one set for next week, and that's still true after updating to 1.25.

UK vs. US? Anyway, thanks for staying on top of this :-)

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