Guide Data Outage - 2019 Summer Edition

Global guide related discussion. All Windows versions.
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AChanceFind

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#161

Post by AChanceFind » Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:26 pm

I did a manual update inside WMC when I saw the first mention it was back and it did its usual thing. I am using OTA antenna.

No longer get "Failed to retrieve EpgListings (Error: Unable to connect to the remote server)" error just the good old classic "Failed to retrieve nettv (Error: PackageName is invalid.)"

Reran those tracert and they still stop about 20 hops in so all that stuff and analysis likely means nothing. We still will never know what insanity goes on at MS that leads to these situations.
Last edited by AChanceFind on Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

jimij1000

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#162

Post by jimij1000 » Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:38 pm

SugarFree wrote: Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:19 pm > Guide data is back for 01731 (Burlington, MA)!

Hallelujah! Till what date? And who is your provider? After these outages, restorations tend to go alphabetically by provider. Did you try a manual update, or did it just appear? I'm on Verizon, just tried another manual, which failed.

Sorry for all the questions, and thanks for letting us know.

UPDATE: Got the error message - but the guide uploaded correctly anyway. Talk about "just in the nick of time."
Hello SugarFree, It seems my scheduled task for mcupdate.exe ran on its own at 5:55PM EDT. Depending on your version of windows you might need to enable schedule task history.

bros

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#163

Post by bros » Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:41 pm

Guide data is back here.

m056678

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#164

Post by m056678 » Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:41 pm

SugarFree wrote: Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:19 pm Till what date? And who is your provider? After these outages, restorations tend to go alphabetically by provider. Did you try a manual update, or did it just appear? I'm on Verizon, just tried another manual, which failed.
Verizon FiOS, data through 11 July 2019 at 8 AM. It was a manual update.

jimij1000

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#165

Post by jimij1000 » Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:44 pm

AChanceFind wrote: Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:26 pm I did a manual update inside WMC when I saw the first mention it was back and it did its usual thing. I am using OTA antenna.

Reran those tracert and they still stop about 20 hops in so all that stuff and analysis likely means nothing. We still will never know what insanity goes on at MS that leads to these situations.
Hello AChanceFind can you look at my earlier repost and try and run the same test I did. I'm still curious if the results will be different. I tried to do the same test again but will probably need to wait awhile since the guide update was successful less than an hour ago on it's own. PM or e-mail me if you need any help.

JohnW248

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#166

Post by JohnW248 » Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:44 pm

Manual updates worked for me from either the notification icon for MC with update data or the Guide will run out in 3 days warning and update that way.

However do the forced update from the admin C prompt which opens to Windows\system 32 type the following:
cd .. (enter)
cd ehome\ (enter)
mcupdate.exe -uf (enter)

This runs both the give me the latest AND Client Maintenance so the Guide will update but Windows will be busy for up to an hour cleaning and polishing the data.

JohnW248

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#167

Post by JohnW248 » Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:48 pm

SugarFree wrote: Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:19 pm > Guide data is back for 01731 (Burlington, MA)!

Hallelujah! Till what date? And who is your provider? After these outages, restorations tend to go alphabetically by provider. Did you try a manual update, or did it just appear? I'm on Verizon, just tried another manual, which failed.

Sorry for all the questions, and thanks for letting us know.

UPDATE: Got the error message - but the guide uploaded correctly anyway. Talk about "just in the nick of time."
If you mean the pop up had the error updating that because it always will until MSFT deletes nettv from the task--update starts gets to nettv and fails and then restarts and completes if you go to the Task Viewer you'll see the difference between the last couple of updates. Lesson: don't believe MSFT messages they often mean different things.

oakley516

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#168

Post by oakley516 » Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:49 pm

I'm on Verizon and I just manually updated.

Got the "guide download error" message, but the guide did update to July 10th anyway. :thumbup:

mainertodd

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#169

Post by mainertodd » Fri Jun 28, 2019 11:00 pm

It's back for me too (Verizon in Maryland, suburban DC). Microsoft certainly cut it close this time...

At any rate, thanks to davidhp and Chalres for recommending TitanTV. I've been disappointed with Zap2It since they redesigned their site a while back and eliminated some of the most helpful features and was looking for something different. I've been playing around with TitanTV for a bit preparing to do manual scheduling in WMC. I really like that you can quickly toggle the grid to show only new episodes, and (unlike Zap2It) you can customize to show up to 6 hours at a time.

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ExtraMedium

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#170

Post by ExtraMedium » Fri Jun 28, 2019 11:10 pm

Xfinity in Montgomery County Maryland. Had the error but the guide is through July 11th now.

Rickt1962

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#171

Post by Rickt1962 » Fri Jun 28, 2019 11:51 pm

Well the IRAN attack is OVER ! guide is back here in central Pennsylvania !
HTPC W7 pro with HDhomerun with 6 tuners using Comcast scanned by MCEbuddy uploaded to network to be watched by KODI

AChanceFind

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#172

Post by AChanceFind » Fri Jun 28, 2019 11:58 pm

jimij1000 wrote: Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:44 pm
AChanceFind wrote: Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:26 pm I did a manual update inside WMC when I saw the first mention it was back and it did its usual thing. I am using OTA antenna.

Reran those tracert and they still stop about 20 hops in so all that stuff and analysis likely means nothing. We still will never know what insanity goes on at MS that leads to these situations.
Hello AChanceFind can you look at my earlier repost and try and run the same test I did. I'm still curious if the results will be different. I tried to do the same test again but will probably need to wait awhile since the guide update was successful less than an hour ago on it's own. PM or e-mail me if you need any help.
Looks like I can't "record" in Win7 resource monitor but I watched it while I ran another update cycle and did not see any 10.xx addresses. I know 10.xxx is usually internal but I think some are not , perhaps someone out there with recent experience can confirm. I haven't really done networking stuff in 6 years. The one I happened to jot down is 65.55.5.170 which when I did tracert on that gets into about 12 hops inside msn.net before stopping. There was also something going to xxxxxxxxxxx.deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com so guessing some CDN stuff?

I'm not sure any of us mere mortals can figure out the things MS does but if anyone has a theory I'm always curious.

Either way glad it's back for now and when it's over it'll be over as I have decided to just get a regular TIVO DVR or something like that when the time comes. As I get older I really am losing patience or interest with fiddling and fussing with tech issues too much; technology should be easy and not take up too much time to figure out! :D

Space

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#173

Post by Space » Sat Jun 29, 2019 12:22 am

suzakuofLE wrote: Fri Jun 28, 2019 7:10 pm
Space wrote: Fri Jun 28, 2019 6:32 pm
stevethebrain wrote: Fri Jun 28, 2019 5:43 pm anyone know of a decent TV guide so I could do manuel recordings.

I tryed both TVguide.com and MSN.com and both bombarded me w/ adds and still couldn't find whats on.

please advice I think american ninja is on tonight and there's a nascar car on NBC. Thanks STB
From my observations, Gracenote has the most accurate guide data, https://tvlistings.zap2it.com/ uses their data. However I don't know about ads, since I use an ad blocker.

I also use titantv.com, although their data tends to be less accurate than Gracenote. I use them because you can go through your Series in WMC and add each series on titantv.com as a "Favorite" (click on the yellow star) and then go to https://titantv.com/favorites/default.aspx and get a listing of all the new episodes (select the "New only" option in the "More" section) for all your "Favorites" in chronological order (you have to select each day in the drop down menu). You need to set up an account and specify your provider/lineup, then you can check off the channels you subscribe to in your plan so that you don't get episodes in the list that are on channels to which you don't subscribe.

EDIT: http://www.tvismypacifier.com/category/this-week-on-tv/ also gives a list of all NEW episodes as well as any new series, but you have to sift through a bunch a shows that you may not care about.
Will titan TV link into WMC and record things as scheduled ? I have never tried it with WMC, before, but if it will work, it may be the best choice if the normal guide does not return.
No, you cannot set up recordings on WMC using a link on titantv.com.

Anyway, guide data appears to be back for everyone, so no need at the moment...

choliscott

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#174

Post by choliscott » Sat Jun 29, 2019 12:55 am

Link is not working

quote=foxwood post_id=132040 time=1561756232 user_id=2333]
Here's a link to the WMC Electronic Programming Guide Terms Of Service.
[/quote]

jimij1000

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#175

Post by jimij1000 » Sat Jun 29, 2019 1:18 am

AChanceFind wrote: Fri Jun 28, 2019 11:58 pm
jimij1000 wrote: Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:44 pm
AChanceFind wrote: Fri Jun 28, 2019 10:26 pm I did a manual update inside WMC when I saw the first mention it was back and it did its usual thing. I am using OTA antenna.

Reran those tracert and they still stop about 20 hops in so all that stuff and analysis likely means nothing. We still will never know what insanity goes on at MS that leads to these situations.
Hello AChanceFind can you look at my earlier repost and try and run the same test I did. I'm still curious if the results will be different. I tried to do the same test again but will probably need to wait awhile since the guide update was successful less than an hour ago on it's own. PM or e-mail me if you need any help.
Looks like I can't "record" in Win7 resource monitor but I watched it while I ran another update cycle and did not see any 10.xx addresses. I know 10.xxx is usually internal but I think some are not , perhaps someone out there with recent experience can confirm. I haven't really done networking stuff in 6 years. The one I happened to jot down is 65.55.5.170 which when I did tracert on that gets into about 12 hops inside msn.net before stopping. There was also something going to xxxxxxxxxxx.deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com so guessing some CDN stuff?

I'm not sure any of us mere mortals can figure out the things MS does but if anyone has a theory I'm always curious.

Either way glad it's back for now and when it's over it'll be over as I have decided to just get a regular TIVO DVR or something like that when the time comes. As I get older I really am losing patience or interest with fiddling and fussing with tech issues too much; technology should be easy and not take up too much time to figure out! :D
Thanks for testing. I actual took a video with my cell phone of resource monitor after clicking the "get latest guide listings.

anyone else wants to try it and see what results you find. Again my engineering hat looking for an RCA (root cause analysis).


previous post:
So I put on my engineering hat and took a video of the TCP connections in resource monitor on windows 8.1 once the manual click of the "get latest guide listings" was pressed inside MCE. The video shows that an instance of mcupdate.exe makes a connection to a few different IP addresses, and then spawns additional mcupdate.exe's to run over the course of about 3 minutes. the IP's that were recorded are these:
10.223.55.10
65.55.186.113
191.232.80.197
134.170.29.74
134.170.29.194
10.223.55.10

I have the 10.223.55.10 address listed twice intentionally as it opens, closes the connection several times. Also important to note is that 10.x.x.x IP's are not routable over the internet. Not being able to fully understand or decompile the mcupdate.exe code it seems the process is trying to make a TCP connection to a non routable IP address. I'd be curious if others could give it a try and see if my findings match yours?

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#176

Post by Bunk_Tuppins » Sat Jun 29, 2019 1:25 am

Got data thru July 10th Medford OR OTA! Yay. Couple days there with no guide data.

Space

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#177

Post by Space » Sat Jun 29, 2019 1:30 am

Now that the crisis appears to be over, has anyone else noticed that many episodes are showing up in your "view scheduled" list that have already been recorded in the past?

I use "New & Rerun" extensively in my Series, and I am seeing many old episodes that I have already recorded in the past showing up (at least much more than usual). I am wondering if the fix they did to get it working again affected the unique IDs of episodes in some way. Most of the shows I am seeing this with are on AMC, such as "The Walking Dead" (which has a marathon on July 4th) and "Preacher", but I am also seeing it on other shows like "Face Off" and "The Conners".

I have seen this happen (a show or two every week), but not to this extent. It may just be a fluke, but I guess we'll see if it continues...

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#178

Post by garyan2 » Sat Jun 29, 2019 1:48 am

Space wrote: Sat Jun 29, 2019 1:30 am Now that the crisis appears to be over, has anyone else noticed that many episodes are showing up in your "view scheduled" list that have already been recorded in the past?

I use "New & Rerun" extensively in my Series, and I am seeing many old episodes that I have already recorded in the past showing up (at least much more than usual). I am wondering if the fix they did to get it working again affected the unique IDs of episodes in some way. Most of the shows I am seeing this with are on AMC, such as "The Walking Dead" (which has a marathon on July 4th) and "Preacher", but I am also seeing it on other shows like "Face Off" and "The Conners".

I have seen this happen (a show or two every week), but not to this extent. It may just be a fluke, but I guess we'll see if it continues...
You might have to wait for all the indexing to complete with such an influx of programs... not just the recording index, but the guide index as well.
- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io

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davidhp

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#179

Post by davidhp » Sat Jun 29, 2019 2:21 am

Guide updating rather quickly, here in Las Vegas, nothing like waiting to the last minute.

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#180

Post by GDog » Sat Jun 29, 2019 2:25 am

I'm a new poster to the forum. Been Lurking for a number of years. I post only rarely - BUT

I wanted everyone to know that I got down to less than 3 days of guide data. I right clicked on the task bar icon and selected 'Update Now'. Lo and behold - I got a full update out to July 11th!

Good News for us all! Finally! That was a close one.

GDog

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