1.27.0 Recorded TV Thumbnail Oddities (1 Viewer)

[CyberSimian]

The exercise revealed only 5 recording on 3 channels whose names had changed, so there is evidently some other mechanism than simple text matching at work in mapping the channel logos.

Did clearing the database and then importing the existing recordings solve the problem with the channel logos, or are there still some older recordings that are missing their channel logos?

The "SERIESNUM" and "EPISODE*" tags are always empty in my XML fields, even for the recordings that MP has filed away as series episodes.

In the UK, I use the EPG that is broadcast with the DVB-T/T2 datastream, and that does not provide series or episode numbers that are usable by TV Server (but see below).

The criterion that TV Server uses to decide whether a recording is a "series" or a single programme is the type of schedule that you create. If you create a repeating schedule of any type (e.g. "every time on this channel", or "weekly on this day of the week", or ...), TV Server regards those programmes as being a series, and so uses the series recording path to store them. It is common to call this capability of TV Server series recording, but that is not the correct term. It is actually repeated recording.

In the UK, the DVB-T/T2 EPG actually has true series and episode ids that can be used to record a genuine series. My Humax DVR can do this, but unfortunately TV Server cannot . Occasionally the BBC will schedule a series on a particular theme that consists of programmes from different makers. These programmes have differing titles, and so cannot be recorded by TV Server as a series (because TV Server simply looks for repeated occurrences of the selected title). But true series and episode ids allow these disparate programmes to be recorded as a series. Maybe someday it will be implemented in TV Server.

It makes little sense that the default "Time Offset" for extracting recording thumbs is zero when the default "Start recording" time is 7 minutes before the scheduled program starts.

When you first install MP, the default for pre-padding is zero minutes, so there is some logic in the default time offset for thumbnails also being zero. But when you change the pre-padding value, the time offset for thumbnails does not change correspondingly (the two settings are not linked in TV Server).

In the UK, I use a pre-padding of one minute, post-padding of five minutes, and a thumbnail time-offset of five minutes. (Obviously the optimal values will depend on the practices of the broadcasters in your part of the world. )

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

[rsbrux]

Did clearing the database and then importing the existing recordings solve the problem with the channel logos, or are there still some older recordings that are missing their channel logos?

After I performed the usual "Change channel" for the 5 recordings with changed channel names mentioned above, all of the recordings were mapped to the appropriate channel logos.

The criterion that TV Server uses to decide whether a recording is a "series" or a single programme is the type of schedule that you create. If you create a repeating schedule of any type (e.g. "every time on this channel", or "weekly on this day of the week", or ...), TV Server regards those programmes as being a series, and so uses the series recording path to store them. It is common to call this capability of TV Server series recording, but that is not the correct term. It is actually repeated recording.

In the UK, the DVB-T/T2 EPG actually has true series and episode ids that can be used to record a genuine series. My Humax DVR can do this, but unfortunately TV Server cannot . Occasionally the BBC will schedule a series on a particular theme that consists of programmes from different makers. These programmes have differing titles, and so cannot be recorded by TV Server as a series (because TV Server simply looks for repeated occurrences of the selected title). But true series and episode ids allow these disparate programmes to be recorded as a series. Maybe someday it will be implemented in TV Server.

I'm afraid there is little hope for my DVB-C provider. Not only are series and episode tags missing, even the naming is inconsistent. The "COMMENT" tag usually contains episode identification but, occasionally a movie will be identified as episode 1 of season 1 :-{ Genuine series episodes usually have identical names but are sometimes identified by an episode number in the title, e.g. "Doctor Who (12)". This may be due to the offering here of broadcasts of different langauges and different countries of origin. With this kind of inconsisteny, MP would be hard put to make sense of it ;-{

When you first install MP, the default for pre-padding is zero minutes, so there is some logic in the default time offset for thumbnails also being zero. But when you change the pre-padding value, the time offset for thumbnails does not change correspondingly (the two settings are not linked in TV Server).

Perplexing! Before my recent "Fresh install" I had set pre-recording to 5 minutes, but after the "Fresh install" it was set to 7 minutes. I did not import any backed-up settings, but (most of) the TV server settings were apparently preserved, presumably because they were stored in the SQL db.

In the UK, I use a pre-padding of one minute, post-padding of five minutes, and a thumbnail time-offset of five minutes. (Obviously the optimal values will depend on the practices of the broadcasters in your part of the world. )

My standard settings are also pre- and post-padding of 5 minutes, but with a thumbnail creation offset of 10 minutes, as senders here are notoriously imprecise with their starting times. Even so I sometimes get a thumbnail of a commercial ;-{
Thanks again for your help!