EPG Yesterday

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Gripweed

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EPG Yesterday

#1

Post by Gripweed » Thu Apr 22, 2021 5:55 am

Just wondering... You know how TV Guide's EPG https://www.tvguide.com/listings/ and Zap2It's EPG https://tvlistings.zap2it.com/ allow you to view yesterday's shows? Is there anyway for WMC's Guide to show yesterday's listings? Heck, as it is now it won't show 30 minutes in the past. Maybe there is a secret registry trick or something like that?
My wondering about this all dates back to Tuesday's FBI Most Wanted. WMC recorded it but when we viewed it it turned out to be a CBS News show about the Derek Chauvin verdict. So on Wednesday I checked the yesterday listings at TV Guide and Zap2it and they showed that FBI Most Wanted's episode was pre-empted by the news show and would air next week. Even TVDB showed the FBI Most Wanted episode as being shown next week. Now, I do my SD/EPG123 update right before Primetime and I would think CBS would have made that programming decision by then and SD would be providing the most up-to-date data for that night at that time. I would have liked to have seen what actually was listed on WMC's Guide. The recording was set as a Series recording and I think there was some discussion here on this forum in the past (which I can't find right now) about last minute changes in scheduling not overriding Series recordings on some occasions or something to that effect. Just curious if this was one of those occasions.

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#2

Post by IT Troll » Thu Apr 22, 2021 6:54 am

My understanding is that the PvrSchedule task is responsible for updating scheduled series recordings. If you are updating your EPG just before Primetime then this task should be triggering. I suspect the listing change didn’t make it through SD in time.

One option would to be to enable File History backups of epg123.mxf. Then you could go back in time to see what the file contained at time of import.
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#3

Post by Space » Thu Apr 22, 2021 8:37 am

The past guide data is there, but I know of no way to get WMC to display it.

However, Remote Potato allows you jump backwards and see the WMC guide many days in the past. In fact, I just tried it out and it goes all the way back to October 28th of last year!

This must certainly be wrong, and I think maybe garbage cleanup may not be working on my system for some reason (it's been taking 2 hours to run instead of 1 hour as it has in the past).

So anyway, I just found an issue with my system, but I think for you, Remote Potato will allow you to see several days back in time (at least as far back as to when garbage collection removed the old days).

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#4

Post by IT Troll » Thu Apr 22, 2021 1:31 pm

Space wrote: Thu Apr 22, 2021 8:37 am The past guide data is there, but I know of no way to get WMC to display it.
I actually had the same thought and wondered if a third-party guide viewer was the answer. I checked with My Media Center and that doesn't allow you to go back beyond today.

I assume SD/EPG123 will not bother with an update once past the start time?
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#5

Post by Space » Thu Apr 22, 2021 3:46 pm

It's possible for EPG123 to update the guide after that time has passed. I believe it updates based on GMT days, (I think it updates from the previous day, onward) so if you are updating at 7:59pm ET on Friday during DST that would be 11:59pm GMT Friday, so it would update from Wednesday 8pm ET (Thursday midnight GMT) onward. If you were instead to update the guide a minute later at Friday 8pm ET, then I think it may only update starting from Thursday 8pm ET onward.

But in both cases, the guide listings from the past will be updated. Depending when you perform the update it may modify/update the listings up to just shy of 48 hours in the past.

This is just from my vague memory of how Gary said it worked, so it may be wrong, and he will probably correct me.

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#6

Post by garyan2 » Thu Apr 22, 2021 7:42 pm

Lot of questions here... let's see how I do.

SD sync's with Gracenote twice a day, so for the situation Tuesday, even if Gracenote was on the ball and updated all their listings for all the affected stations, it could still be a considerable time before SD has their cache updated for us to download.

SD provides, I believe, only the day prior to the current date and forward. I can't request listings from 2 days ago. All dates are based on GMT.

EPG123 will request the current date and future dates to equal the number of days requested. However, if the time when the requests is made is between 0000Z-0400Z, I will request the day prior as well. So a request for 14 days could end up being 15 days if the update is run between 0000Z-0400Z. This really isn't necessary on my part, but I added it so if someone did a clean install during that time then they wouldn't have "missing" guide data for shows that started prior to 0000Z and are still ongoing.

I'll have to take a look, but I think the Guide page in WMC is hardcoded to not go back in time. I remember seeing that MXF code, but I can't remember if that is something that may be tweakable.

When an update is imported into WMC, it will not update any schedule entries that are either currently active or any schedule entries that are next up. EPG123 does the same for the verify routine... also, EPG123 does not perform any verification of past schedule entries.
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#7

Post by Gripweed » Thu Apr 22, 2021 9:24 pm

Quick response - Wow!, you guys are amazing with your knowledge. I really appreciate your feedback. I'm really interested in using the Remote Potato idea. Unfortunately I won't be able to get to it until later tonight or tomorrow due to life getting in the way.
Let me give you a preview of another (similar but opposite) problem I was just alerted to. And, boy, was I alerted. My wife's soap opera never got recorded today. I looked into it but again I wasn't able to see the WMC guide in the past to know whether it was in fact scheduled. Looking at the log I found this...
[4/22/2021 6:23:02 AM] [ INFO] Service WNEPDT: Adding schedule entry from 4/22/2021 2:00:00 PM to 4/22/2021 3:00:00 PM for program [EP00001807_4718 - [General Hospital] - [s58e141 General Hospital]].
[4/22/2021 6:23:02 AM] [ INFO] Service WNEPDT: Adding schedule entry from 4/26/2021 2:00:00 PM to 4/26/2021 3:00:00 PM for program [EP00001807_4720 - [General Hospital] - [s58e143 General Hospital]].
[4/22/2021 6:23:02 AM] [ INFO] Service WNEPDT: Adding schedule entry from 4/27/2021 2:00:00 PM to 4/27/2021 3:00:00 PM for program [EP00001807_4721 - [General Hospital] - [s58e144 General Hospital]].
[4/22/2021 6:23:02 AM] [ INFO] Service WNEPDT: Adding schedule entry from 4/28/2021 2:00:00 PM to 4/28/2021 3:00:00 PM for program [EP00001807_4722 - [General Hospital] - [s58e145 General Hospital]].
[4/22/2021 6:23:02 AM] [ INFO] Service WNEPDT: Removing schedule entry on 4/22/2021 2:00:00 PM for [EP00001807_4719 - [General Hospital]-[s58e142 General Hospital]] due to being replaced/overlapped by another schedule entry.
[4/22/2021 6:23:02 AM] [ INFO] Service WNEPDT: Removing schedule entry on 4/26/2021 2:00:00 PM for [EP00001807_4721 - [General Hospital]-[s58e144 General Hospital]] due to being replaced/overlapped by another schedule entry.
[4/22/2021 6:23:02 AM] [ INFO] Service WNEPDT: Removing schedule entry on 4/27/2021 2:00:00 PM for [EP00001807_4722 - [General Hospital]-[s58e145 General Hospital]] due to being replaced/overlapped by another schedule entry.
[4/22/2021 6:23:02 AM] [ INFO] Service WNEPDT: Removing schedule entry on 4/28/2021 2:00:00 PM for [EP00001807_4723 - [General Hospital]-[s58e146 General Hospital]] due to being replaced/overlapped by another schedule entry.

So, it looks like the schedule was being adjusted for the show being pre-empted one day for the Chauvin trial earlier in the week. If I read this right, S58E141 should have correctly been recorded today. Nothing was recorded. Note: the update happened on my morning update at 6am so it should have worked at 2pm today. It didn't. I update twice a day, around 6am and just before Primetime around 6:30pm.

Got to go. More later.

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#8

Post by garyan2 » Thu Apr 22, 2021 9:36 pm

Yes, it should have been recorded unless it recorded what it thought was s58e141 (EP00001807_4718) on Tuesday not knowing it was preempted. In which case, it wouldn't try to record it again.
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#9

Post by Space » Thu Apr 22, 2021 10:52 pm

I'm not sure about this but I THINK that Gracenote sometimes changes the tmsID of an episode if the scheduling of that show was changed last minute just for situations like this. I've had the situation where it recorded the original time-slot of an episode, but it was actually rescheduled to the next week, and WMC picked it up as a new episode the next week (even though it should have thought it already recorded the episode). Although I'm not really sure why this happened.

Also, Gary, any idea why I may have WMC guide data going all the way back to October 2020? It looks like none of the old guide data since then has been purged from the WMC DB.

I'll take a look at the event viewer, but I am guessing there won't be anything unusual there. Any ideas where else to look?

I have a separate process that is doing the garbage collection (I disable it in EPG123), perhaps I am using the incorrect parameters?

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#10

Post by garyan2 » Thu Apr 22, 2021 11:07 pm

If you have all guide information going back that far, then probably the garbage collection is failing. If there are entries sporadically going back that far, then it is probably due to programs that you have recorded are still referencing the schedule entries and WMC won't purge those while the recordings still exist... at least, I think. The schedule entries referenced by recordings (or referenced by your guide listings) aren't flagged for cleanup.

Try a manual garbage collection from a command prompt. If it errors, then you have your answer.
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#11

Post by Space » Thu Apr 22, 2021 11:39 pm

Yeah, I have a full guide going back to end of October, before that I have sporadic entries in the guide that correspond to recordings.

I'm going to have some time to look at this tonight, so I'll see what I find.

Thanks.

UPDATE:

As expected, no unusual entries in the Event Viewer.

I see that the mcepg2-0.db is 1.2 GB, and comparing that to the old databases I had prior to first installing EPG123, the biggest DB I had was 546 MB. So it is about double the size of what it was back then (which may explain why garbage collection is talking 2 hours now when it used to take 1 hour).

I will run the garbage collection process in a CMD window and see if it prints out any errors, here is what I am using for garbage collection:

%SystemRoot%\ehome\mcupdate -dbgc -updateTrigger

Please let me know if this command line looks OK or not.

I have a bunch of recordings in progress and they won't be over for three hours, so i will wait until then to try this.
Last edited by Space on Fri Apr 23, 2021 12:07 am, edited 1 time in total.

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#12

Post by garyan2 » Fri Apr 23, 2021 12:06 am

The command looks fine. The -updateTrigger isn't needed. Without it, the mcupdate will run a reindex operation at the end of the dbgc. I use -updateTrigger with epg123 because I didn't want to have the process be dbgc->reindex->import->reindex... pretty time consuming.

EDIT: I'll add that I use the updateTrigger for epg123 because mcupdate will kick off the reindex task, not waiting for it to complete. I didn't want epg123 to perform an import while the reindex was happening.
Last edited by garyan2 on Fri Apr 23, 2021 12:13 am, edited 2 times in total.
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#13

Post by Space » Fri Apr 23, 2021 12:10 am

Are you saying that the -updateTrigger disables the indexing?

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#14

Post by garyan2 » Fri Apr 23, 2021 12:12 am

The updateTrigger prevents mcupdate from kicking off the reindex task when the dbgc completes.
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#15

Post by Space » Fri Apr 23, 2021 12:16 am

OK, I don't know why I added that then. I assume with this option, indexing will trigger by other means, but may not happen right after the garbage collection.

EDIT:

I see your edit above, so I guess the process is now: dbgc->import->reindex

So that the import part does not occur at the same time as the reindex (and so that you are not doing two reindexes).

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#16

Post by garyan2 » Fri Apr 23, 2021 12:46 am

Right for both reasons. I didn't want a separate process reading/writing excessively to the database while I have mcupdate importing guide listings, and I didn't want to try to start the reindex task again... the task could already be running from the mcupdate run and during import.

The other means of kicking off the reindex was done by epg123 after an import. So that was still happening for you.
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#17

Post by Space » Fri Apr 23, 2021 3:37 am

I started the garbage cleanup in a CMD window, but it just immediately gave the prompt back, so it appears to be running in the background and I don't know if any output will be sent to the CMD window.

I did not use the -updateTrigger option (as I normally do) and this time it logged the following in the event viewer, which it usually does not (normally it just logs Event 2 below, not Event 1):

Event 1:
11:15:33 PM - The MCEClientMaintenance package is not available.
11:15:33 PM - Update successful.

Event 2:
11:15:41 PM - Starting Client Maintenance.

I'm guessing the missing -updateTrigger option caused this message to be logged.

I'm still waiting for the garbage collection to complete and will see if there is any change.

P.S. Sorry to hijack this thread. I can start another one if you still want to discuss the original issue.

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#18

Post by Gripweed » Fri Apr 23, 2021 4:47 am

garyan2 wrote: Thu Apr 22, 2021 9:36 pm Yes, it should have been recorded unless it recorded what it thought was s58e141 (EP00001807_4718) on Tuesday not knowing it was preempted. In which case, it wouldn't try to record it again.
That's exactly what happened, sort of. e140 was the pre-empted on Tuesday which then aired on Wednesday but was listed as e141. SD made the adjustment for Thursday to be e141 after Wednesday's airing so no recording was done. I'm glad that little mystery was solved. Thank you so much. Luckily I'm getting better at downloading streams from the network's websites.

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#19

Post by Gripweed » Fri Apr 23, 2021 5:01 am

Gripweed wrote: Thu Apr 22, 2021 9:24 pm I'm really interested in using the Remote Potato idea. Unfortunately I won't be able to get to it until later tonight or tomorrow due to life getting in the way.
I took a look at it and it looks to be more work than what it is worth. Other than the guide that goes back in time I already have most of or all of the features it offers on other programs already. No joking, I can think of 5 programs I have that allow me to watch Live TV. Maybe I'll play with it over the weekend but I can't see it being a keeper.

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#20

Post by Space » Fri Apr 23, 2021 5:32 am

Space wrote: Fri Apr 23, 2021 3:37 am ...
I'm still waiting for the garbage collection to complete and will see if there is any change.
Well, it's done and no change, database is still around 1.2 GB and the guide still goes back to October.

Any other ideas?

I'm thinking about using the "[Rebuild WMC Database]" button.

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