For The Record - The rule-based scheduling suite

[mrbenji]

I'm crossposting this problem here because I'm starting to suspect it may have something to do with Tv Scheduler, and I haven't gotten a single response in the regular support forum, which leads me to believe it's not a common problem.

Also, The only time this hasn't happened was one night when I accidentally cancelled a Tv Scheduler recording, then re-added the recording manually. Other than that night this has been happening consistently for about a week.

Any other Tv Scheduler users running into this problem?

Thanks.

----------------------

For the past three mornings I've walked into my living room and seen the HD light on my HTPC flashing like crazy. Turning my TV on I've noticed the red record dot displaying in the corner of the MP menu, even though nothing should have been recording (last recording was night before).

On the first morning and again on this morning the TV streams display showed all three of my tuners recording something, two on the same channel. A restart of TvService causes the recordings to stop... this says to me there's no issue with a mis-set post-record, as the recordings would in that case immediately start up again when TvService started, right?

This morning I inspected my recordings from the night before, and found 3 recordings for the same episode of Boston Legal. Two of them started on time and were almost 8hrs long... i.e. they'd run throughout the night, and were still hogging two of my tuners when I got up in the morning. The third started 5 minutes after the scheduled time, and concluded on time... this would be the tuner that wound up running on through the night on a different channel.

Another data point: when I bring up my TV Service config screen and look at manual control after a recording is supposed to have finished (but is still running) I've noticed that every active tuner is listed twice!

I've tried with each of the last 3 SVNs and the problem's not going away.

Can anyone tell me what's going on?

Thanks,
Benji

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TV-Server Version: 1.0 RC1 svn-05-09-2008
MediaPortal Version: 1.0 RC1 svn-05-09-2008
MediaPortal Skin: Monochrome 1.9.800
Windows Version: Vista Ultimate 64bit
CPU Type: AMD Phenom 9600 (Quad 2.3gHz)
HDD: Samsung HD501LJ Spinpoint T166 (500GB)
Memory: 4GB DDR2
Motherboard: ECS GeForce6100PM-M2
Motherboard Chipset: NVidia GeForce 6100 / nForce 430
Video Card: Sapphire HD3470 (ATI Radeon)
Video Card Driver: Latest
1. TV Cards: 3 Pinnacle PCTV HD PRO Sticks (a.k.a. PCTV 330e)
1. TV Card Type: USB "sticks" (3 of them)
1. TV Card Driver: Latest
MPEG2 Video Codec: MPV Decoder Filter
MPEG2 Audio Codec: ffdshow Audio Decoder
Satelite/CableTV Provider: None (OTA antenna)
HTPC Case: Antec Fusion 430 V2
Cooling: Scythe Ninja Mini CPU cooler + equipment cabinet is actively ventilated
Power Supply: Antec 430 Watt
Remote: Logitech Harmony 550, i-Rocks USB Remote Receiver.
TV: Olevia 237T
TV -> HTPC Connection: Sapphire HD3470 HDMI out

[dvdfreak]

I hope you can get your problem fixed, but I doubt it has something to do with TV Scheduler. Al my plugin does is create schedules in MediaPortal, the actual recording is done by MediaPortal's code, so the problem must lie there somewhere...

[fillerguy]

same problem for me!! some recordings are ok, other times duplicates will start after the original recording. files names have a _1 or _2 at the end. the original recording will stop at the right time but the duplicate recording will just keep going. I've looked through the logs and I've noted that the recording starts, a sync between the plugin and tve3 occurs, then another recording starts.

I've attached my tv.log. look @ 21.30, the scheduled recording starts. the plugin syncs the schedules, then another recording starts again a few minutes later.

[dvdfreak]

Whatever happens during such a sync, TVE3 should never keep recording. For arguments sake, let's assume a new schedule is synced by accident just after a recording ends. Then that newly synced schedule will still have a correct ending time, so even if TVE3 picks it up again it should still stop in time.

Anwyay, the "new TV Scheduler" will no longer sync schedules to make TVE3 record, it will do its recording in a more direct way. If all goes according to plan, an announcement is coming next week.

[mrbenji]

Originally Posted by dvdfreak

Anwyay, the "new TV Scheduler" will no longer sync schedules to make TVE3 record, it will do its recording in a more direct way. If all goes according to plan, an announcement is coming next week.

Looking forward to this! I'm crossing my fingers that your initial release is stable enough to "put in charge" of my recordings right away, although (if my experience is any judge) that would make you something of a superhuman developer!

In the here and now, however, I'm more and more convinced that this issue is the result of malformed schedule data being written to the database by TvScheduler. Last night I disabled the schedule sync plugin and deleted my auto-scheduled recording, replacing it with a manual recording. The manual recording started and stopped on time... in total, that makes only two times in the past week where I haven't had runaway recordings, both occurring after I deleted the TvSheduler recording and entered in a manual recording for the same show.

[dvdfreak]

Originally Posted by mrbenji

Looking forward to this! I'm crossing my fingers that your initial release is stable enough to "put in charge" of my recordings right away, although (if my experience is any judge) that would make you something of a superhuman developer!

Never be afraid to aim high

We're testing the system quite a bit before releasing it. It's been very stable for us for several weeks now, but your mileage may vary of course! Simply because there are so many things that can be different in different setups...

Originally Posted by mrbenji

In the here and now, however, I'm more and more convinced that this issue is the result of malformed schedule data being written to the database by TvScheduler. Last night I disabled the schedule sync plugin and deleted my auto-scheduled recording, replacing it with a manual recording. The manual recording started and stopped on time... in total, that makes only two times in the past week where I haven't had runaway recordings, both occurring after I deleted the TvSheduler recording and entered in a manual recording for the same show.

I doubt the schedule data is malformed, but I can imagine something somewhere is going wrong because a schedule re-appears when it is not expected to. To be blunt, I'm not even going to look at this or try to fix this (even if the problem lies in TV Scheduler after all). There's simply no point, the new system is due any day now and will immediately make TV Scheduler obsolete since in a way it still is TV Scheduler, just continuing and evolving under a different name.

I hope you can understand that.

[jburnette]

dvdfreak,

I apologize if I've missed this in the past few posts, but I had a quick question. In this new rendition of TVScheduler, will it allow us to use EPG data from the database so that those of us using things like SchedulesDirect will be able to benefit from this without using an XMLTV file?

[dvdfreak]

What would be ideal is that someone will write a SchedulesDirect importer for the "new TV Scheduler". Our services API will be fully documented, so it's quite easy to do this... And who knows, perhaps we'll take care of this ourselves soon after launching the first version, to help out our US and Canadian friends and get our product on their approved programs list

Until this is realized you'll have to resort to using XMLTV like before.

[Ernie-c]

Hi dvd-freak,

I think I just compiled for the last time, and so the time has come to release the bits, and unveal all the secrets, as we promised to do on "Towel Day", which is already a few days behind us now ;-)) It was real pleasure for me to work on "this project" for almost a year. It took quite a lot of effort, but I think we can be proud of what we achieved now. I would like to explicitly thank dvdfreak for this nice co-operation. I'll leave the final announcement to him ...

Kind regards, and enjoy ...

[Bussiebaer]

Thanks for all the work you, dvd-freak and any other put into this! Looking forward to see the results of your project :-)