Media Center EPG: Rovi Guide Data Quality

Global guide related discussion. All Windows versions.
Space

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#21

Post by Space » Fri Jul 31, 2015 2:39 am

Might as well copy my list over from the other thread (some have already been mentioned here)...

o No year of release for movies.
o Many episodes of different shows on various channels do not have episode specific data.
o Many "To Be Announced" blocks in the guide for various channels. even major networks (take a look at the prime-time block on August 8th for NBC, even though tvguide.com has program data, msn.com and WMC does not. UPDATE: This NBC block now has programming data with last night's update). Animal Planet seems to be the worst with large amounts of "Animal Planet Programming" and "To Be Announced" blocks today and every day for the entire guide.
o Episodes with multiple parts (part x of y) display "Part#1", etc. instead of the episode name. This only affects episodes that use the part/parts fields in the SheduleEntry.
o Movies no longer have a "Review" tab which used to have a movie review from a critic from (ironically), Rovi.
o Sometimes when an episode does not yet have episode specific information, Rovi will assign it "fake" information (usually giving it an episode title matching the name of the show). This defeat the WMC feature of "when in doubt, record", which causes episodes without episode specific info to be recorded just to be safe.

Bob.Blockerlundt

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#22

Post by Bob.Blockerlundt » Fri Jul 31, 2015 10:06 am

Since these threads don't have a Summary Wiki section like some other forums do, I thought we could try linking to a page on the wiki instead. So I created a wiki page to organize the data quality bugs reported so far:
http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/wiki/index ... ta_Quality

I tried to tie each issue to a Microsoft Connect bug ID#, so that we can consolidate relevant discussion and vote up those bugs as needed. Hopefully, this will cut down on the duplicate entries being added. There are already many duplicates, but I tried to go with the earliest bug IDs after 2015-07-07.

Feel free to add on and update!

BigSacAttack

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#23

Post by BigSacAttack » Fri Jul 31, 2015 4:09 pm

I am in Sacramento, Comcast Digital cable, and my WMC guide has about 10 channels or so that are reporting (East) so my recordings on those channels have been messed up for the past couple weeks. I've reset the TV Signal a few times, download guide listings, nothing works except copying the guide info from the SD channel.

Space

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#24

Post by Space » Fri Jul 31, 2015 6:57 pm

It looks like some of the episode titles and descriptions are coming back. An entire channel that had none now has them on almost all episodes on roviguide.com and I am also seeing some of those changes in the latest WMC update.

I am also seeing "Released YYYY" for movies on roviguide now, and strangely also for TV show episodes!?

Bob.Blockerlundt

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#25

Post by Bob.Blockerlundt » Fri Jul 31, 2015 8:43 pm

BigSacAttack wrote:I am in Sacramento, Comcast Digital cable, and my WMC guide has about 10 channels or so that are reporting (East) so my recordings on those channels have been messed up for the past couple weeks. I've reset the TV Signal a few times, download guide listings, nothing works except copying the guide info from the SD channel.
Thanks, found some related bugs and updated the wiki http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/wiki/index ... ta_Quality
#923032 Rovi guide is off by a few hours due to timezones for certain channels. (Also related: #1590425, #1606725).

Windom

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#26

Post by Windom » Sat Aug 01, 2015 1:31 am

A series recording for "E! News" still doesn't work even a week from now. It seems to think that each airing has an episode name of "Today's Top Stories". I'm guessing that should actually be in the description field.

shiznits

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#27

Post by shiznits » Sat Aug 01, 2015 2:47 am

i had issues listed, especially the wrong thumbnail for shows, like showing "the jeffersons" for sportscenter....

i went the guide options (settings - tv- guide) in WMC and ran "get latest guide data"

that seemed to clean everything up. if it does not work for you try doing it twice and restarting.

i did this on 2 desktops with the same issue and they seem to be working perfectly now.

this is in richmond, va 23219 comcast digital with cablecard on hdhomerunprime using windows 7

BigSacAttack

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#28

Post by BigSacAttack » Sat Aug 01, 2015 4:05 am

I also opened up a Microsoft Connect feedback incident for the time zone issue. #1615210 for reference.

SugarFree

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#29

Post by SugarFree » Sat Aug 01, 2015 1:16 pm

Space wrote: it looks like the data is there, it was just loaded in to the wrong field in the database.
Turns out you are absolutely correct. Please see my post below.

SugarFree

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#30

Post by SugarFree » Sat Aug 01, 2015 1:20 pm

Received another email from the Rovi Manager. Below, with my reply:

The year of release and a better description is provided in the data we are sending to MS. I have an email over to the MS team to ensure they are pulling the correct fields into their system to display on WMC systems. I'll get back to you when I hear back from MS.

===================
I knew Rovi had the extended data. Since you're sending it to MS -- and they are not using it -- it's clear they must be pulling the wrong fields. Sigh. Hope this gets fixed soon.

apalousey

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#31

Post by apalousey » Sun Aug 02, 2015 10:02 pm

Delays while scrolling channels in guide:

Since the conversion of the WMC EPG to Rovi, significant lags (delays) occur when scrolling down the channel listings. The lags/delays occur after scrolling down the first several listings. The delay before continuing to subsequent listing(s) can vary from approximately 15 seconds to over 30 seconds. This behavior prevents to user from quickly proceeding down the channel listings, and can require several minutes of wasted time to locate the desired channel listing. This behavior did not occur under the Zap-to-It EPG. Scrolling down the channel listings was smooth, consistent, and uninterrupted by lags/delays.

hansolo89

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#32

Post by hansolo89 » Mon Aug 03, 2015 12:05 am

until yesterday i had guide data with late night guests on talk shows , now in latest guide update Rovi decided to take back what they fixed, what's going on?

Space

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#33

Post by Space » Mon Aug 03, 2015 3:17 am

apalousey wrote:Delays while scrolling channels in guide:

Since the conversion of the WMC EPG to Rovi, significant lags (delays) occur when scrolling down the channel listings. The lags/delays occur after scrolling down the first several listings. The delay before continuing to subsequent listing(s) can vary from approximately 15 seconds to over 30 seconds. This behavior prevents to user from quickly proceeding down the channel listings, and can require several minutes of wasted time to locate the desired channel listing. This behavior did not occur under the Zap-to-It EPG. Scrolling down the channel listings was smooth, consistent, and uninterrupted by lags/delays.
Are you using an extender? This is a known issue thought to be caused by the pictures associated with each program in the guide being much larger than they were with zap2it.
If you are using WMC directly on the server, then it probably also slows it down a bit, but it should not be that slow.

Whiznot

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#34

Post by Whiznot » Mon Aug 03, 2015 12:48 pm

Whiznot wrote:I hate the way the guide behaves when I try to record individual episodes of ESPN's Sportscenter. The Zap2it guide considered every showing of Sportscenter as a new episode which it is. Rovi seems to consider all episodes as the same, consequently, clicking to record one showing is extremely slow while the guide places the i mark on every other episode.

Does this problem happen to everyone or is it unique to me? I sent Rovi an email about the problem. I previously had a missing channel and after I sent them an email they responded and later restored the channel.
My latest EPG from Rovi no longer has this problem. Every Sportscenter showing is now tagged as a unique episode. Rovi fixed this issue and restored my missing channel. I'm surprised that they've been so responsive.

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Bee_Dee_3_Dee

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#35

Post by Bee_Dee_3_Dee » Mon Aug 03, 2015 3:25 pm

This is the 5th day of my EPG fixing itself.
See: http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... f=6#p93556

Currently:

1. Movies recorded before 7/24/2015, have retained their Star Ratings; but not new Movies. They lack the following:
  1. A. No Star Ratings for any New Movies in the Guide before, during or after recording them.
    B. Synopsis for new and old Movies only consists of a single simplified sentence like, "A cynical nightclub owner (Humphry Bogart) protects an old flame (Ingred Bergman) and her husband (Paul Henreid) from Nazis in Morocco." Before 7/24 there used to be endless really cool details.
    C. No detailed Cast + Crew- only the name(s) of the Director and Actors. (Before 7/24 didn't the names of characters that an actor played appear above the actor's name? And you could click on a name to find out more info?)
2. Poor small thumbnail quality for List items and such. But Large Icons are fine.

All around, everything else has steadily improved each of these past five days. One PC and 3 MC extenders are back up to their normal efficiency. Playback-wise, they never miss or lag a single thing! :) Guide-wise, it is about 90%. And unconscionably it still lags, very noticeably.

ty:)

Mike88

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#36

Post by Mike88 » Mon Aug 03, 2015 8:02 pm

I use OTA and when I first switched to Rovi on 7-20-2015 (had to do a TV Signal setup) I set up a new weekday series recording. The first 2 recordings had the title, original air date & description. But after that they had only a generic description which was the same every day. How did Rovi get all the data for the first 2 days but nothing after that? Guess I should be glad they got recorded.

I then noticed an older existing series recording for Sunday's did have all the guide data for it's first Rovi recording on 7-26-2015, but only a generic description for last Sunday, 8-2-2015. And there is only the generic description for next Sunday 8-9-2015.

IOW they are getting worse. Being that they had complete data at one time means they are capable of getting it & sending it. I sure they figure out how they used to do it.

Jaspehrson

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#37

Post by Jaspehrson » Mon Aug 03, 2015 11:12 pm

The link provided for opening a ticket doesn't work (https://connect.microsoft.com/site1145/Feedback), is there something I'm doing wrong? I select the link and am promoted to login, once I log in I'm told the page cannot be found.

Bob.Blockerlundt

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#38

Post by Bob.Blockerlundt » Tue Aug 04, 2015 2:51 am

Jaspehrson wrote:The link provided for opening a ticket doesn't work (https://connect.microsoft.com/site1145/Feedback), is there something I'm doing wrong? I select the link and am promoted to login, once I log in I'm told the page cannot be found.
I think I remember running into that problem, it's a weird page. Try logging in first, then clicking on the URL again?

HTBruceM

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#39

Post by HTBruceM » Tue Aug 04, 2015 9:42 pm

To resolve missing channels with the whole Rovi conversion, I keep seeing posts that say "just use Guidetool to add missing channels"...

But that is really only a conditional solution for unencrypted clear QAM and OTA signals, right? If you have a HDHR Prime or Ceton InfiniTV cablecard tuner, you cannot use Guidetool to ADD an encrypted channel that is missing from the Rovi guide data. Or am I missing something? Has someone been able to do actually do this?

In my region (Portland Oregon) on Frontier FIOS Digital cable, there are problems with 89 channel mappings (!). Of those 89, there are 39 channels that are either missing completely, or mapped to the wrong channel number. And these incorrectly mapped channels are mostly all encrypted; only 3 of those 39 are shopping channels that are "in the clear". There is no way I can see to override or force those missing channels to appear on the HDHR Prime tuner. The HDHR Prime tuner only accepts the 4 digit virtual channel numbers that come from the Rovi guide data. I see no way to force a QAM channel number (using the nn.yyyy format) to work on the HDHR Prime and change it to display with the correct virtual channel number (4 digit).

Odd how the Silicon Dust configuration utility can discover the "correct" channel numbers... But Windows Media Center relies totally on the Guide data mappings (for cablecard).

Ed 

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#40

Post by Ed  » Tue Aug 04, 2015 9:46 pm

HTBruceM wrote:To resolve missing channels with the whole Rovi conversion, I keep seeing posts that say "just use Guidetool to add missing channels"...

But that is really only a conditional solution for unencrypted clear QAM and OTA signals, right? If you have a HDHR Prime or Ceton InfiniTV cablecard tuner, you cannot use Guidetool to ADD an encrypted channel that is missing from the Rovi guide data. Or am I missing something? Has someone been able to do actually do this?

In my region (Portland Oregon) on Frontier FIOS Digital cable, there are problems with 89 channel mappings (!). Of those 89, there are 39 channels that are either missing completely, or mapped to the wrong channel number. And these incorrectly mapped channels are mostly all encrypted; only 3 of those 39 are shopping channels that are "in the clear". There is no way I can see to override or force those missing channels to appear on the HDHR Prime tuner. The HDHR Prime tuner only accepts the 4 digit virtual channel numbers that come from the Rovi guide data. I see no way to force a QAM channel number (using the nn.yyyy format) to work on the HDHR Prime and change it to display with the correct virtual channel number (4 digit).

Odd how the Silicon Dust configuration utility can discover the "correct" channel numbers... But Windows Media Center relies totally on the Guide data mappings (for cablecard).
http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... f=6#p91583

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