TV Series Import Stalling (1 Viewer)

[globaldonkey]

Just upgraded to MP 1.1.0 and Streamed MP 1.2.1.

Installation worked fine on my test system, and I can successfully import all TV shows on it.

Production system is a different story

The import seems to stall and not progress. Have tried uninstalling Streamed MP and re-installing and re-initialising the database but with no luck. To make sure I wasn't being impatient, I cut the import directory down to one TV Show and waited for more than 30 minutes for the import to complete. No luck, the import stalls each time.

Sometimes, if I cancel the import, I cannot restart it unless I exit plugin config and start it again. Log attached.

EDIT: Stall seems to happen where it goes online to grab banners and fanart from thetvdb.com

 

[ltfearme]

Can you give tvseries debug log of an import process, there is no indication of a stall from that log.

 

[globaldonkey]

OK, here's a better log.... lots of errors getting banners and fanart for some reason.

 

[globaldonkey]

Here's another attempt...... it says online parsing completed at 10:28, but it did not download any banners or fanart.

 

[ltfearme]

So are these files that are corrupt in the log actually been downloaded? Maybe they are 0byte files that have been blocked by a firewall.

You may need to delete these banners...disable the firewall and re-import to test that theory. Other than that I have no idea why the banners downloaded are corrupt.

Possibly you have a bad net connection or thetvdb is having issue atm.

 

[globaldonkey]

Most appear to be downloaded in a quick spot check. I did find one however, that was half an image. Have switched firewall off - same problem.

I'll try again tommorrow in case it is the site, but when I grabbed the url and manually pasted it into internet explorer the image seemed to download ok.

BTW, Moving pictures scraped everything OK and appears to be running well.

 

[globaldonkey]

OK, after struggling with this for the last 24 hours, turns out it was the zone based firewall on my Cisco 877 router. The really strange part is that it was only affecting my production HTPC. Think it was some interaction between NAT and the firewall, and due to the router being on x.x.x.1 and the HTPC being on x.x.x.10. I noticed NTP server responses that were supposed to be going to the router coming to the HTPC in a trace. So suspect NAT was sending some of thetvdb server responses somewhere else. Turn off the firewall and problem fixed. Very strange. Cisco TAC case opened

Thanks for the tip to look at the firewall more closely.

 

[Tesla]

I'm having a similar problem with the new TV Series:

https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/my-tvseries-162/trouble-importing-85318/#post644880

I never could figure it out (other than thinking the program gets confused or over-worked and locks-up).

I just have an old Linksys router. The router and all the machines are on the same subnet. I only use the wireless for the laptop and iPhone. All the MP stuff and servers are wired 100/1000.

Can you tell what port they are using? Do I need to open one? An exception maybe?

 

[globaldonkey]

Yes it does appear you have similar symptoms to what I was experiencing.

As far as I could tell in wireshark traces, it was all using http port 80. I never really got to the bottom of the problem, as I just disabled the firewall on the router for a couple of hours, ran the import and then turned it back on. It worked flawlessly with the firewall disabled. I think the problem is that it is initiating a LOT of individual GET's, and the SPI in the router was clagging. Couldn't see anything in the router logs that indicated a problem though, and these small business routers have a lot of logging capability. Cisco did find I had some inconsistencies in the firewall config (inspect in one direction, pass in the other) and I fixed those, but unsure if it fixed the TV Series import problem, as I couldn't be bothered dumping the database and trying it again.

Best advice I guess would be to see if there is a way to bypass your firewall temporarily. Maybe use the DMZ feature a lot of the SOHO router's have, as this should bypass the firewall? Maybe also try firmware upgrades, as there are usually a lot of firewall fixes in these.

EDIT: Also think that the new grabbing process may be sensitive to timeouts / dropped packets and doesn't recover / retry.