v1.7.0.2 Release

[garyan2]

Okay, for some of the seasons, even though season images exist, the data from SD does not have the flag set to indicate it is available. SD has been working hard to clean up all the images and getting the flags straight and proper, so again next API update should make this better.

Even though you don't have a season image for all the other seasons, you are still seeing the series image correct?

[garyan2]

I'm going to go ahead and release a new version that will accept another flag in the program data from SD to look for season images. I'll let you know when it is ready. You will need to clear your cache again after you update to get the season images, but I just checked Bob's Burgers and it looks great.

The hit/miss on season images is more than likely due to programming epg123 to handle the proposed SD API more than what the current API has available. I actually expected the greatly anticipated changes a few months ago, but it hasn't happened yet.

[garyan2]

Okay, v1.7.0.7 is available. Clear you cache and run an update again. There will be a lot more season images available (more than I expected).

[Space]

Okay, for some of the seasons, even though season images exist, the data from SD does not have the flag set to indicate it is available. SD has been working hard to clean up all the images and getting the flags straight and proper, so again next API update should make this better.

Even though you don't have a season image for all the other seasons, you are still seeing the series image correct?

No, no image at all for those seasons, not even the series image.

I will download the new version and try it out...

EDIT:

OK, I installed the new version and cleared the EPG123 cache (not the image cache, the guide cache)

Now I'm seeing season images for all of the Bob's Burgers episodes. I am also seeing images for "Caillou" (TOON) for which I didn't have ANY images before.

I also saw the first EPG123 cache hits, so it may be that images in the WMC cache are starting to expire. I also saw a bunch of 304-Not Modified (hadn't seen those before, again, probably a result of the WMC cache entries expiring). Although I'm not sure what generates a cache hit vs. a 403, would that be requests coming from WMC that do not include the "If-Modified-Since" header?

I did a general scan of the guide and I haven't found even one show that did not have an image (unlike prior, were there were quite a few missing images), so it looks like this version has fixed the issue I was having.

Now that it appears to be working, I'm wondering if it might be a good idea to make it an option that you can disable. There may be some people that like the same image for every episode of a particular show, in which case you could ignore the season images and just use the default series image for all episodes. Personally I don't care either way, but some might prefer the per-series images (plus it reduces the number of images that need to be downloaded as well as cached).

[mustpushbuttons]

Hi - unless htpc is on fire - all is still good with 1.6.x, right?

[garyan2]

I also saw the first EPG123 cache hits, so it may be that images in the WMC cache are starting to expire. I also saw a bunch of 304-Not Modified (hadn't seen those before, again, probably a result of the WMC cache entries expiring). Although I'm not sure what generates a cache hit vs. a 403, would that be requests coming from WMC that do not include the "If-Modified-Since" header?

Periodically, WMC will validate a cached image. I've seen references to a 10% rule on the web concerning cache control that can describe it. WMC will look at the age of the cached file (its' Last-Modified date), take 10% of that and look at the date/time that the cached file/image was last verified. If the resulting date/time of last verified plus the 10% is in the past, then it will request a condition If-Modified-Since request. With the image cache turned on, the service will check the last time its' cached image was verified but uses a 24-hour rule rather than 10%. If it was validated less than 24 hours ago then the service will respond with a 304. If more than 24 hours, then the service will send SD an If-Modified-Since to SD using the newer Last-Modified value between what WMC is requesting and what is in the image cache. The response determine what the service then does. If SD responds with a new image then it is sent to WMC and the cache is updated. If it is a 304 response, then the service will send WMC a 304 if the request was the same/newer than the cached image; otherwise the service will send the cached image to WMC.

I did a general scan of the guide and I haven't found even one show that did not have an image (unlike prior, were there were quite a few missing images), so it looks like this version has fixed the issue I was having.

This is a little confusing. You should have still had an image for pretty much everything. Each program has the possibility of showing 1 of 3 images. The first level is at the program which is your movie images and in the future will be sport/team event images. If no image link exists, then it will look at the season if the program is part of a series. If the season doesn't exist, then it will go to the series. EPG123 populates all those links if available. The only reason I've seen WMC not show an image is if any of those images through the progression are 404 Not Found, or if it takes too long to download. It appears to me that WMC has a 7-second timeout to get an image. I don't understand why you would have a lot of series without images.

Now that it appears to be working, I'm wondering if it might be a good idea to make it an option that you can disable. There may be some people that like the same image for every episode of a particular show, in which case you could ignore the season images and just use the default series image for all episodes. Personally I don't care either way, but some might prefer the per-series images (plus it reduces the number of images that need to be downloaded as well as cached).

I thought about this but don't want to do anything until we see what the updated API will look like. I wasn't concerned about it because it appeared that there weren't that many season images available to use anyway but as discovered that was because a lot of the programs weren't setting an expected flag to indicate season images were available. I'll let this all play out before making a decision.

[garyan2]

Hi - unless HTPC is on fire - all is still good with 1.6.x, right?

You're "fine" up until SD requires a token for all image requests. With 1.6.x, you are still downloading all images you look at in the guide since the WMC cache is useless due to time limited redirects from SD. Once SD starts requiring a token, then you won't get any images at all.

[Space]

...
I did a general scan of the guide and I haven't found even one show that did not have an image (unlike prior, were there were quite a few missing images), so it looks like this version has fixed the issue I was having.

This is a little confusing. You should have still had an image for pretty much everything. Each program has the possibility of showing 1 of 3 images. The first level is at the program which is your movie images and in the future will be sport/team event images. If no image link exists, then it will look at the season if the program is part of a series. If the season doesn't exist, then it will go to the series. EPG123 populates all those links if available. The only reason I've seen WMC not show an image is if any of those images through the progression are 404 Not Found, or if it takes too long to download. It appears to me that WMC has a 7-second timeout to get an image. I don't understand why you would have a lot of series without images.
...

Well, one of the reasons I upgraded EPG123 when I did was because my old version was missing ALL images all of a sudden. Even after I ran an EPG123 guide update (which I assume would reset the token timer), the images were still missing. Perhaps it was just cached non-images, but I didn't see any images anymore. Even the movies I had recorded a few days earlier were missing poster art in the "movie library" view.

Once I upgraded to the first HTTP server version of EPG123, many of the images were working again (including all the poster art for my already recorded movies) but I was still having the issue described in this thread.

So it might have been old cached data that was causing the missing images, but like I indicated, I was still finding the errors about not being able to download/find images in the server.log for some missing images (but not for others).

[garyan2]

Ah, yes. There is one other thing the service does to avoid problems with the WMC cache. If SD responded with a MAX_IMAGE_DOWNLOADS or UNKNOWN_USER, it would be with an HTTP status code of 200 OK but the content would be the json with the SD error code. Since it was a 200 response, WMC would save it as a .jpg but the content would be the json. Since it is not a valid image, WMC will show nothing and it wouldn't get corrected until it decides to validate it at some time in the future.

EPG123 will read the json content and respond to WMC with an appropriate HTTP status code (429, 401, or sometimes 502 depending). This prevents WMC from caching it. Yet another reason to update to v1.7.x.

[Space]

If that were the reason, I would expect to still have some cached JSON "images", but everything seems to have a proper image now. So either the WMC cache has expired for all those images (or it decided to validate them), or there is some other explanation.

[mustpushbuttons]

Hi - unless HTPC is on fire - all is still good with 1.6.x, right?

You're "fine" up until SD requires a token for all image requests. With 1.6.x, you are still downloading all images you look at in the guide since the WMC cache is useless due to time limited redirects from SD. Once SD starts requiring a token, then you won't get any images at all.

Cool beans, thanks man