Guide and Schedule Recovery

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adam1991

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#21

Post by adam1991 » Sun Jan 07, 2018 9:39 pm

IT Troll wrote: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.
I know this is an old post I'm responding to, but the exact same thing happened to me a few days ago.

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IT Troll

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#22

Post by IT Troll » Sun Jan 07, 2018 10:43 pm

garyan2 wrote:
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.
I don't currently have Automatch enabled. Media Center is discovering new/updated channels and adding and enabling them in the guide. EPG123 is just correctly showing that the channels are in the guide but have no subscribed data.
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IT Troll

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#23

Post by IT Troll » Sun Jan 07, 2018 10:45 pm

adam1991 wrote:
IT Troll wrote:I know this is an old post I'm responding to, but the exact same thing happened to me a few days ago.
It is still an active thread though. I think Gary is currently testing out a theory.
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#24

Post by garyan2 » Sun Jan 07, 2018 11:06 pm

IT Troll wrote:I don't currently have Automatch enabled. Media Center is discovering new/updated channels and adding and enabling them in the guide. EPG123 is just correctly showing that the channels are in the guide but have no subscribed data.
Sorry, what I meant was if you have Automatch enabled, then any new channels that WMC adds, that are not part of your downloaded stations, will then be hidden when EPG123 runs an update.
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#25

Post by garyan2 » Sun Jan 07, 2018 11:08 pm

IT Troll wrote:It is still an active thread though. I think Gary is currently testing out a theory.
More like changing some innocuous code that may or may not have an impact. Only time will tell (and users who upgrade :D )
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#26

Post by IT Troll » Sun Jan 07, 2018 11:48 pm

Ah, I did wonder if that is what you meant. Perhaps I should try running with Automatch enabled again. The stray channels don’t cause any real problem, they just mess up my nice tidy guide.

I am keen to try the new build when it is ready.
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IT Troll

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#27

Post by IT Troll » Tue Jan 09, 2018 12:00 am

Just suffered another recovery. :|

Same as before. Media Center was working fine and continuing to record. However, when I quit Media Center the database reset task kicked in so that I got the recovery message on next run.

I leave the Media Center GUI running 24/7 so it will always be running whilst EPG123 updates. I have the update scheduled for a time when it won’t be recording but I can’t help but think that Media Center is occasionally noticing something about the import and then flagging that a guide reset is required. I only exit Media Center to perform some admin task. In this case it was to upgrade to EPG123 v1.1.19.

In the EPG123 log I also occasionally get new station warnings. These will repeat every day, but stop once I go through a guide recovery. I saw the same pattern during my December incident. Is this expected? Do these lineup events need to be acknowledged in some way to clear the warning?

Code: Select all

[08/01/2018 06:15:02] [ INFO] Successfully retrieved the station mapping for lineup GBR-1000029-DEFAULT.
[08/01/2018 06:15:02] [WARNG] **** Lineup Freeview - Scotland Central (East) (Scotland Central (East)) has added station 105389 (FREEVIE). ****
[08/01/2018 06:15:02] [WARNG] **** Lineup Freeview - Scotland Central (East) (Scotland Central (East)) has added station 73823 (BXNATVM). ****
[08/01/2018 06:15:02] [WARNG] **** Lineup Freeview - Scotland Central (East) (Scotland Central (East)) has added station 105392 (BLLYWDH). ****
[08/01/2018 06:15:02] [WARNG] **** Lineup Freeview - Scotland Central (East) (Scotland Central (East)) has added station 45985 (BBCRSMW). ****
[08/01/2018 06:15:02] [WARNG] **** Lineup Freeview - Scotland Central (East) (Scotland Central (East)) has added station 27209 (BBCRNGD). ****
[08/01/2018 06:15:02] Exiting buildLineupServices(). SUCCESS.
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#28

Post by adam1991 » Tue Jan 09, 2018 1:02 am

I will say, I very strongly suspect "new station" is an issue. My situation happened RIGHT around the same time I noticed an article in the paper about a new network for millenials popping up all over, including locally.

And after my situation happened and as part of the recovery, EPG123 told me that there was another channel that it previously didn't have. I looked through the lineup, and there it was.

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#29

Post by garyan2 » Tue Jan 09, 2018 4:19 am

adam1991 wrote:I will say, I very strongly suspect "new station" is an issue. My situation happened RIGHT around the same time I noticed an article in the paper about a new network for millenials popping up all over, including locally.

And after my situation happened and as part of the recovery, EPG123 told me that there was another channel that it previously didn't have. I looked through the lineup, and there it was.
Correlation does not equal causation.

For the warnings in the epg123 log, they are there when a new station is added to the SD lineup. Nothing more is downloaded and nothing additional is done during the update. The message will continue until the user uses the configuration GUI to include or not include the new station (i.e. Save with the new station checked or unchecked). Bottom line, there is no difference in the epg123 update with or without a new station in the SD lineup.

That being said, based on your observations, maybe it is related to a new station physically. Could this be due to some background scanning and WMC is trying to enforce some logic for a new channel?I

@IT Troll: here in the states when we enter a postal code, we can use an invalid code of 00000 and continue setup. WMC will have no idea concerning lineups or anything. Is that possible for a Great Britain setup as well?

@adam1991: are you OTA, CableCard, ...?

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#30

Post by IT Troll » Tue Jan 09, 2018 2:36 pm

garyan2 wrote:That being said, based on your observations, maybe it is related to a new station physically. Could this be due to some background scanning and WMC is trying to enforce some logic for a new channel?I

@IT Troll: here in the states when we enter a postal code, we can use an invalid code of 00000 and continue setup. WMC will have no idea concerning lineups or anything. Is that possible for a Great Britain setup as well?
I think it is got to me something in this area. Media Center is still detecting new channels despite having opportunistic scanning disabled in registry (BackgroundScanner\PeriodicScanEnabled=0).

For the original setup I think I may have entered my post code, but then definitely did as instructed and declined the terms of service. Perhaps Media Center is discovering the new channels, enabling them, finding it can't obtain any data for them and so assumes it needs to trigger a recovery? I still have the standard Media Center update task running on a daily basis. Is this serving any real purpose? Could it be this that is flagging the recovery?

Perhaps running EPG123 with Automatched enabled would help clean up these channels, but I guess that would depend on the exact sequence of events.

There is another registry setting to disable the in-band guider loader (GLID\DisableInbandScheduleLoading=1) I think I will give that a try next. Failing that, rename/block McGlidHost.exe
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#31

Post by IT Troll » Tue Jan 09, 2018 10:23 pm

I've now added the registry which supposedly disables the in-band guide (it is useless anyway for DVB-T2). I'll have to wait to see if this puts a stop to channel discovery.

Here is log from my daily Media Center Update. You can see it processing a null MXF file for Broadband packages. Then failing to retrieve any EPG listings for HeadendId 42 (i.e. EPG123).

Code: Select all

04:47:08 - Testing Internet connection.
04:47:08 - Connection established.
04:47:10 - Retrieving Directory.
04:47:10 - Processing Directory.
04:47:10 - Processing of Directory is complete.
04:47:10 - The SportsSchedule package is not available.
04:47:10 - The SportsV2 package is not available.
04:47:10 - The NetTV package is not available.
04:47:10 - The MCESpotlight package is already up to date.
04:47:10 - The MCEClientMaintenance package is already up to date.
04:47:10 - The NetworkMetadata package is not available.
04:47:10 - Testing Internet connection.
04:47:10 - Connection established.
04:47:11 - Retrieving ClientUpdate.
04:47:11 - Processing ClientUpdate.
04:47:11 - Retrieving ClientUpdate.enc.
04:47:12 - Extracting DefaultGeoSettings.mxf.
04:47:12 - Processing DefaultGeoSettings.mxf.
04:47:12 - Retrieving NetopWhitelist.cab.
04:47:12 - Extracting Whitelist.xml.
04:47:12 - Processing Whitelist.xml.
04:47:13 - Processing of ClientUpdate is complete.
04:47:13 - Retrieving MCEClientUX.
04:47:13 - Processing MCEClientUX.
04:47:13 - Retrieving dSM.cab.
04:47:13 - Extracting StartResources.dll.
04:47:13 - Retrieving Logos.cab.
04:47:14 - Extracting LogoUK.png.
04:47:14 - Extracting SkyLogo.png.
04:47:14 - Retrieving SMTiles.cab.
04:47:14 - Extracting StartMenuMovies_SKY.png.
04:47:14 - Extracting StartMenuTV_SKY.png.
04:47:14 - Extracting StartMenu_ITV_Search.png.
04:47:14 - Extracting StartMenu_MSN_UK.png.
04:47:14 - Retrieving UpdateableMarkup.cab.
04:47:14 - Extracting markup.dll.
04:47:14 - Processing of MCEClientUX is complete.
04:47:15 - Retrieving Broadband.
04:47:16 - Processing Broadband.
04:47:16 - Retrieving Broadband.enc.
04:47:16 - Extracting null-gb_null_29_BBPkg.mxf.
04:47:16 - Processing null-gb_null_29_BBPkg.mxf.
04:47:16 - Processing of Broadband is complete.
04:47:17 - Retrieving EpgListings.
04:47:18 - Retrieving EpgListings.
04:47:18 - Failed to retrieve EpgListings (Error: HeadendId 42 is invalid.)
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#32

Post by adam1991 » Wed Jan 10, 2018 1:28 am

garyan2 wrote:That being said, based on your observations, maybe it is related to a new station physically. Could this be due to some background scanning and WMC is trying to enforce some logic for a new channel?

@adam1991: are you OTA, CableCard, ...?
I am OTA.

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#33

Post by garyan2 » Wed Jan 10, 2018 1:40 am

Then I believe we are on to something ... something that makes some sense, anyway. The new found channels from a background scan may be the trigger that sets whatever this is off.

Looks like I have some research to do. :crazy:
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#34

Post by IT Troll » Wed Jan 10, 2018 10:26 am

I don't think it is a background scan as such. DVB broadcasts contain data about other channels on the same service. This allows new/changed channel announcements to be received whilst watching/recording a channel. I think this is separate to opportunistic scanning and the in-band guide processes. In some other PVR software you can configure what happens with this.

The thing is, I ran with EPG123 for a whole year before encountering this. So something has changed. Perhaps Microsoft are up to their Media Center killing tricks again. :think:
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#35

Post by IT Troll » Wed Jan 10, 2018 7:09 pm

So in the past 24 hours, Media Center has discovered and enabled two channels, whilst EPG123 warned that 4 new channels had been added to my SD line-up. Neither of these things has triggered a recovery. :crazy:

I have now disabled the Media Center data updates in the GUI. However, this doesn't disable the mcupdate_scheduled task in the Task Scheduler, so I have disabled this manually. Ordinarily this runs the command:

Code: Select all

mcupdate.exe -crl -hms -pscn 15
I am fairly certain -pscn is periodic scan. It would be nice to know what the other switches do.

I do still have the Media Center Optimization GUI task enabled, but as far as I know this just restarts the processes to keep things running well.
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#36

Post by garyan2 » Wed Jan 10, 2018 8:10 pm

IT Troll wrote:So in the past 24 hours, Media Center has discovered and enabled two channels, whilst EPG123 warned that 4 new channels had been added to my SD line-up. Neither of these things has triggered a recovery. :crazy:

I have now disabled the Media Center data updates in the GUI. However, this doesn't disable the mcupdate_scheduled task in the Task Scheduler, so I have disabled this manually. Ordinarily this runs the command:

Code: Select all

mcupdate.exe -crl -hms -pscn 15
I am fairly certain -pscn is periodic scan. It would be nice to know what the other switches do.

I do still have the Media Center Optimization GUI task enabled, but as far as I know this just restarts the processes to keep things running well.
I steer well clear of the optimization task. Even before EPG123, if I enabled that I would more than likely experience a "recovery". Does the time for the optimization overlap the EPG123 task?
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#37

Post by IT Troll » Thu Jan 11, 2018 1:00 am

No, I had them set well apart. 4:00 Optimization, 4:30 - 5:00 MC Update, 6:15 EPG123.

I’ll turn Optimization off next.
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#38

Post by IT Troll » Sat Jan 13, 2018 8:05 pm

So, today I had a few more channels discovered and enabled. This is all part of a year long programme of frequency changes and re-tunes which is so that the 700MHz frequency can be cleared for a 5G mobile service.

The interesting thing is I now have all background scanning, in-band guide updates and Media Center updates disabled. The only things which now appear in my event log are recordings and EPG123 updates. I think this must mean that these channels are being discovered through the DVB channel announcement data within the broadcast. I am not sure if there is a way to stop these being processed by Media Center, I believe I have disabled everything I can.

Still hasn't triggered recovery a yet. Fingers crossed it stays like that.
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#39

Post by chrisdfw » Tue Feb 13, 2018 9:05 pm

I just had this happen today. Odd thing is I just deleted the new database and renamed and copied the old one in and all is back to normal. I am windows 8.1 and have RTVHD.

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#40

Post by garyan2 » Wed Feb 14, 2018 3:22 am

chrisdfw wrote:I just had this happen today. Odd thing is I just deleted the new database and renamed and copied the old one in and all is back to normal. I am windows 8.1 and have RTVHD.
Makes you wonder why WMC felt the need to "recover" in the first place.
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