7MC Recording History is behind by 4 days

[dejavux2]

Hello. I don't know when this started, but my recording history is behind by 4 days. I've never seen this before, and cannot find anything about this. Has anyone else seen this before?

Example: Today is 02/10/2014, but my recorded history is only showing items up to 02/06/2014... I know things are recording, but the history of the recordings doesn't show up until 4 days later.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[mistarick]

Seems strange? Just wmc or are you using something like recorded tvhd add in? Did you manually look in the recorded TV folder to make sure it has still been recording? Is that how you know? Time/date showing up correctly elsewhere?

[CyberSimian]

my recording history is behind by 4 days. Has anyone else seen this before? Example: Today is 02/10/2014, but my recorded history is only showing items up to 02/06/2014... I know things are recording, but the history of the recordings doesn't show up until 4 days later.

Yes, I have had this happen (on Vista), and I am pretty sure that I know what causes it.

When you go to "View Schedule" and select "History", Media Center reads the WMC event log to create the history that WMC displays. The problem originates with the WMC event log. Access the event-log properties as follows:

"Start" -> "Control Panel" -> "Administrative Tools" -> "Event Viewer" -> expand "Applications and Services Logs" (left side bar) -> "Media Center" -> "Properties" (right side bar).

On the log-properties panel, you will see that there are several choices for how the log should be handled. There is a "Maximum log size" setting, for which (on Vista) the default is 8MB. There is also an "Action when log is full" setting, with the alternatives being:

(1) Overwrite events as needed (oldest events first)
(2) Archive the log when full, do not overwrite events
(3) Do not overwrite events (clear logs manually)

The default (on Vista) is (1), and this is where the problem occurs. When the end of the log file is reached, the log is supposed to "wrap around" to the beginning (overwriting the oldest entries with the new entries), but WMC does not do this correctly -- the part of WMC that reads the log (to generate the "History" panel) gets out-of-sync with the part of WMC that writes the log, with the result that the most-recent entries do not appear in the "History" panel until several days later.

If this happened every time that the log wrapped-around, missing entries in the "History" panel would occur far more often than is reported in newsgroups, so I suspect that there is some particular combination of circumstances that causes this to happen (i.e. most of the time the wrapping-around works correctly). Nevertheless, I decided to change the log action from (1) to (2). I also decided to reduce the maximum size of the log from 8MB to 2MB, to speed-up generation of the "History" panel (which I review every day).

EDIT: One consequence of changing from (1) to (2) is that when WMC archives the current log, entries in that log no longer appear in the "History" panel, so the list of entries on that panel appears unexpectedly short. But for me this is preferable to the most-recent entries being missing.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[dejavux2]

Thank you CyberSimian, I will try this when I get home from work today... It was driving me crazy not being able to see the most recent history... especially when something was missed...

mistarick: I'm just using WMC, no recording add-ons at all. Yes, the recordings show in the Recorded TV folder. It's when something isn't recorded that I cannot see the history as to why it didn't record (until 4 days later).

[dejavux2]

I made the changes in the Event Viewer. Nothing has changed in the history, yet. I have not done a restart, which I will do this evening.

[CyberSimian]

I made the changes in the Event Viewer. Nothing has changed in the history, yet. I have not done a restart, which I will do this evening.

To clear the problem, you need to cause WMC to create a new event log file. If your existing log file is already at the maximum size, changing from (1) (wrap-around) to (2) (archive automatically) ought to create a new log file. If this does not happen, you might need to archive (or clear) the current log file manually; I think that there is an action for this on the right side bar of the "Event Log" panel for the WMC Event Log. And a reboot is probably a good idea, too.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[dejavux2]

The "Clear Log" worked! It even gave me the option to save the old history to an archive file.

Thanks for all of your help!