Guide and Schedule Recovery

An evolving, supported alternative to Rovi
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IT Troll

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Guide and Schedule Recovery

#1

Post by IT Troll » Wed Jun 28, 2017 8:31 pm

I had a strange one tonight. I came to use Media Center and got a pop up that there was a problem with my guide and scheduled recordings. Media Center then ran a recovery which left me with an empty guide and no scheduled recordings.

I checked the EPG123 logs for the previous run and all looked fine, no errors or problems.

So I ran EPG123 manually which repopulated my guide. I then ran the PvrSchedule task which rebuilt my scheduled series recordings. The only thing missing then were any individual recordings I had scheduled.

I am not sure what the root cause was, but at least I was back up and running fairly quickly.
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#2

Post by DaveInPa » Wed Jun 28, 2017 8:47 pm

This has happened to me on a few occasions, but it's rare.

I believe that WMC detects a problem and crashes the guide. If you can run automatch then it is easy to fix. If you have customized channels, that has to be re-done.

This happens to me if I start WMC while the "ehtray" service is running (e.g. the green button in the tray).

I don't think this problem can be consistently repeated and there is no current solution.

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#3

Post by garyan2 » Wed Jun 28, 2017 11:12 pm

DaveInPa wrote:If you have customized channels, that has to be re-done.
Not necessarily. When the crash happens, WMC creates a new database and a new folder (mcepgX-X) to start fresh. Since the old stuff is still there, you could theoretically restore the backup\lineups file which will restore any custom channel number and restore the guide listing matches from before.
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#4

Post by DaveInPa » Thu Jun 29, 2017 12:21 pm

I guess I should have said that for my situation, I have always had to redo any custom channels. Thankfully, I only have a few. (I merge my OTA channels with the cable channels that are the same.)

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#5

Post by Sammy2 » Thu Jun 29, 2017 7:03 pm

This happened to me last week. Had it all patched up in a jiffy. Just ran the import tool and guide tool and got it all back up and going. Took a little bit of time but all is well. I believe this has happened to me in the past too but long ago now. What really sucks is that WMC won't let you do anything until you "recover" into a blank guide. The option to "Cancel" is there but you cannot select it, you can only hit "Okay" and proceed.

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#6

Post by IT Troll » Fri Jun 30, 2017 8:44 pm

Well fingers crossed I never get another. This is the first time for me after running Media Center for several years - since XP.

It would be real pain if it happend whilst I was away. I have MyMediaCenter for remote access but this wouldn't be able to kick off the initial recovery.
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#7

Post by StinkyImp » Sat Jul 01, 2017 3:01 pm

I've been running my setup in WMC7 for over 5 years now with no real problems. I absolutely LOVE EPG123 and have been using it since the 1.0.0 release! It's really breathed life back into my system! I run a pretty vanilla setup and use it primarily for OTA DVR'ing. I'm lucky to live in an area that has 80+ (rescanned last week to verify) OTA channels. Granted, only about half are remotely interesting, but they're free...

Anyway... I have this same issue about once a month or so. When it happens I do the same as Sammy2 and it gets patched up with the exception of having to [Add Missing Channels] by following the "Additional OTA Configuration" instructions in the EPG123 installation guide.

Is there any way to backup my channel lineup and restore it after this happens instead of typing in the channels manually? I've looked at Sean's Backup and also noticed that garyan2 posted links to Guide Tool (albeit crippled) on his website.

I'm not really sure about these tools because of my unfamiliarity. I don't need a high level, complex, configuration utility, all I'd like to do is make a backup of my channel lineup (and "Series" if possible) and be able to restore it pretty easily. Insights and recommendations are certainly welcome!

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#8

Post by IT Troll » Tue Aug 01, 2017 11:20 pm

I just had another of these. Very strange. I have been running Media Center for years and never had this. Then I get two a month apart.

I guess the old databases and backup folders will just hang around forever. Is it safe to delete them?
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#9

Post by IT Troll » Thu Dec 28, 2017 8:12 pm

Had another of these whilst I was away over Christmas which resulted in no recordings for several days. :x

This comes only a few days after the UK line up changes. :think:

Looking at the logs, EPG123 ran successfully at 06:15 then the "recovery" hits at 10:33. No recordings were made or scheduled between these times and Media Center wasn't even running...

Code: Select all

Information	24/12/2017 06:15:11	EPG123	0	None
06:15:00 - Beginning EPG123 update execution. 2017-12-24 06:15:00Z
06:15:04 - Processed 266 daily schedules for 19 stations.
06:15:09 - Processed 3117 program descriptions.
06:15:10 - Processed 741 series descriptions.
06:15:10 - Processed 403 movie poster links.
06:15:11 - Processed 741 series image links.
06:15:11 - Completed save of mxf file.
06:15:11 - Completed save of image archive file.
06:15:11 - 311 files deleted from the cache directory during cleanup.
06:15:11 - Completed EPG123 update execution. SUCCESS.

Information	24/12/2017 06:15:17	epg123Client	0	None
06:15:11 - Beginning epg123 client execution. 2017-12-24 06:15:11Z
06:15:17 - Successfully imported .mxf file into Media Center database. Exit code: 0
06:15:17 - Completed lineup refresh.
06:15:17 - Successfully started the ReindexSearchRoot task. Exit code: 0
06:15:17 - Completed EPG123 client execution.

Warning	24/12/2017 10:33:29	mcstore	1	None
Recovery of guide listings and recording schedule is complete.
Are you a Recorded TV HD user or want to give it a try? Check out the new community-made update; Recorded TV HD v2.1.1

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#10

Post by garyan2 » Thu Dec 28, 2017 11:46 pm

What do you use to customize your guide? Is it always active and updating? I know when I was working on the guide tweaks that I would periodically get the "recovery" problem when WMC opened after a tweak. There was no pattern to when it occurred other than I was messing with it (modifying resources).
- Gary
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#11

Post by IT Troll » Fri Dec 29, 2017 12:31 am

The only guide customisation I have, other than EPG123, is My Channel Logos. However, after the initial setup I hardly ever need to run in. It’s more of a set once thing.

The only other customisations which would have been running at the time are; Recorded TV HD and My Media Center. AFAIK RTVHD doesn’t go anywhere near the guide. MMC might be a suspect, but I had been using that for almost a year before my first recovery incident.
Are you a Recorded TV HD user or want to give it a try? Check out the new community-made update; Recorded TV HD v2.1.1

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#12

Post by garyan2 » Fri Dec 29, 2017 12:45 am

I wouldn't suspect either RTVHD or MMC. I've been running MMC without issue for quite a while. I'll try to do some research to see if there is any way that EPG123 could be making this problem more prevalent than what it used to be... maybe I need to do something special with the database after I import the guide data.

I may have asked this before, do you use automatch?
- Gary
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#13

Post by IT Troll » Fri Dec 29, 2017 1:07 am

No, I don’t use automatch, so nothing major should change during the daily import.

Media Center will sometimes find new channels through it’s opportunistic background scan. Perhaps that could be causing some kind of inconsistency?

However, I never had the problem before June this year. Which around the v1.1.5 - v1.1.8 releases.
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#14

Post by garyan2 » Fri Dec 29, 2017 1:17 am

I actually disable WMC background scanning in registry so it shouldn't be doing that. Maybe in-band scanning?

I'll do a compare between 1.1.0 and 1.1.8 to see if there are any differences in how I handle the store. Doing a compare between 1.0.2 and 1.1.8 may be too difficult considering all the changes I made to 1.1.0.
- Gary
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#15

Post by IT Troll » Fri Dec 29, 2017 9:30 am

Well I do still get new channels appearing occasionally within Media Center. But they don't have EPG123 data because I don’t have “auto add new” enabled. In my experience it is hard to stop this behaviour, there are a couple of different registry settings which should disable background/opportunistic scanning, but it still seems to happen. Freeview channels can occasionally change/move and so picking up these changes is quite useful.

Isn’t in-band scanning just for OTA EPG updates within a given MUX? This only occurs whilst you are watching/recording a channel, but doesn’t actually work with Media Center on HD channels because of the encoding used (which is why we need EPG123).

The only other thing running periodically is the regular Media Center update task. This fails to obtain any guide data because of the setup, but it still runs every day (about two hours before EPG123).
Are you a Recorded TV HD user or want to give it a try? Check out the new community-made update; Recorded TV HD v2.1.1

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#16

Post by IT Troll » Fri Dec 29, 2017 7:17 pm

I spent a bit more time crawling over task history and event logs to build up a timeline.

Code: Select all

04:53:29 mcupdate_scheduled

06:15:00 epg123_update
06:15:17 ReindexSearchRoot

10:33:29.000 mcstore - Recovery of guide listings
10:33:29.361 mcupdate
10:33:29.657 RegisterSearch

10:33:31 mcGlidHost.exe application error (this is the In-Band Guide Loader)
At 10:33 the recovery is initiated which triggers the mcupdate and RegisterSearch tasks which don't ordinarily run on a schedule. I searched and searched for something which might have initiated this action but couldn't find anything. Then it dawned on me that this must have been the time that I closed the Media Center GUI. So Media Center must have internally flagged that a recovery was required and then waited and triggered this on next exit. This makes tracing back to the specific event which caused the problem very difficult.

I wonder if disabling the mcupdate and ReindexSearchRoot tasks would prevent the recovery from taking place...?
Are you a Recorded TV HD user or want to give it a try? Check out the new community-made update; Recorded TV HD v2.1.1

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#17

Post by garyan2 » Sat Dec 30, 2017 4:48 pm

I think I may have found something, though it won't mean anything if you are running on Win7. Though there was really no difference in the way I handled the import/update of the store between the client versions, it does appear that I had attempted to build a single executable which would support both .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 by adding useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy in the App.config file for the Win8+ versions. I had added this in either the 1.1.3 (03 March) or the 1.1.4 (15 April) version.

I'll remove that entry and see if it breaks anything. I've tried to use the legacy option for multiple reasons in the past and most failed so it might not be needed.
- Gary
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#18

Post by IT Troll » Sun Dec 31, 2017 12:07 am

I am running Win 8.1 so this could have some merit.
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#19

Post by IT Troll » Sun Jan 07, 2018 5:23 pm

garyan2 wrote:I actually disable WMC background scanning in registry so it shouldn't be doing that.
Had some unwanted channels pop-up again this weekend. I checked the registry setting and it is correctly set to supposedly disable this behaviour. I have looked into this before, but it seems, at least with DTB, it can't be stopped: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5489

Perhaps EPG123 could have an option to automatically disable a channel if it doesn't have any SD guide data?
Attachments
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#20

Post by garyan2 » Sun Jan 07, 2018 5:52 pm

IT Troll wrote:Perhaps EPG123 could have an option to automatically disable a channel if it doesn't have any SD guide data?
If you have 'Automatically match ...' enabled, this will be the behavior. I'll have to think about any ramifications of making this a default behavior or how to implement it as an option.
- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io

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