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kkingsto

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#21

Post by kkingsto » Sun Jan 17, 2021 11:22 pm

Basically trying to find series that are no longer being recorded. I'll figure another way out. Thanks for answering my question though.

Space

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#22

Post by Space » Mon Jan 18, 2021 5:48 am

I installed this version and I have a few issues and observations on the transfer tool...

There is a "Manual" type recording called "Manual Recording" that is scheduled to record on 12/19/2020 2am-3am. This is something that I would expect WMC to purge after the date has passed, as there is no good reason to keep it. But in any case, it is colored light green, which seems inappropriate. It does seem appropriate for all manual recordings to be colored this way but only if they are scheduled for the future. (I assume I can delete this entry using the left mouse button menu? Note that I am unable to see this listed in the "Series" section of WMC, so therefore unable to delete it there).

There are several OneTime type recordings for movies and TV episodes. It's nice to see these, since you cannot see them in WMC (or even know they exist). I assume if I use the right mouse menu to "Cancel" them, they will be removed from WMC? If so, that is a nice feature and a good way to clear your WMC DB from old stuff you may not want anymore.
I have a OneTime in there for an episode of a show that was preempted so it will be interesting to see if it picks up that episode if it ever airs (I'll have to check if it did ever air first I guess).

I have two OneTime entries, one for "The Amazing Race" s32e06 airing on 11/18/2020 and the other for "The Masked Singer" s04e08 airing 11/18/2020. Both of these entries are showing up as light green, even though they do not currently appear in the guide and are not scheduled to record. I recall that I was having some issue with WMC on that date and it caused these two shows to not begin recording on time, I forget what I did to fix it, but may have set up manual records. Note that I have other OneTime entries for TV episodes and they are correctly colored dark green, it is just these two that are light green for some reason.

I have several WishList types, and all are dark green except for one that is light green, it is for an actor, however there is no recording scheduled to record for this actor. If I search the guide for this actor, it returns no results.

Is an item only supposed to be light green if there is a recording scheduled for that item? Will it also be light green if there is a matching program, but it is not being recorded due to it already having been recorded by that Series in the past?

EDIT: Ignore the below, I just tried it again it it does allow me to adjust the relative widths of the panels, I guess I wasn't positioning the pointer in the exact right spot when I tried it before.

Can you make a way to disable the left panel? That panel is not necessary unless you are importing recordings from a backup and just takes up space if you are not. Perhaps if not a way to disable, a way to adjust the relative widths of the two panels so that you can drag the left side of the right panel all the way over to the left? I've found that I have some entries that I can not read all the values due to the panel not being wide enough and the inability to make it wider even though there is plenty of space being taken up by the empty left side panel.

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garyan2

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#23

Post by garyan2 » Mon Jan 18, 2021 6:33 am

If I read the WMC code correctly, any Manual request that has not been satisfied/cancelled will be removed after 180 days. So it does get cleaned up eventually.

The Transfer Tool determines whether a request will be light green or dark green based on the whether any requested programs for the request are flagged as "scheduled". I haven't seen what you describe, but the only thing I can think of is the old schedule entry is still flagged as scheduled. There are probably a few scenarios I don't have covered that we will discover over time. The Manual and OneTime requests are the most difficult. Right-clicking the entry and selecting 'Cancel' will set the "Complete" flag for the request and it will no longer show on the right side. Same is true for any type of request.

I found that keyword/wishlist requests, even though you specify a specific actor/director/title, will simply use the names/titles as a keyword for any entry. You may have a recording scheduled based on the actors name because it showed up in a program synopsis or something. You will have to look through your scheduled recordings to find it. When working on this, I had a program title request 'Undercover Boss' and ended up with a few movies scheduled because it was about undercover cops, probably going after a mob boss.

The intent was to use the light green color only if there was a program scheduled to record for that request. I scan through the list of requested programs for the request (the matches) and look for the scheduled flag to be true on any of them. Based on what you observed on the Manual request, I may have to look at more flags to validate it.
- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io

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garyan2

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#24

Post by garyan2 » Mon Jan 18, 2021 7:08 am

There is another flag I can use to validate the scheduled flag for non-recurring manual requests. This should remove the past requests from showing in the panel.
- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io

Space

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#25

Post by Space » Mon Jan 18, 2021 7:47 am

garyan2 wrote: Mon Jan 18, 2021 6:33 am ...
I found that keyword/wishlist requests, even though you specify a specific actor/director/title, will simply use the names/titles as a keyword for any entry. You may have a recording scheduled based on the actors name because it showed up in a program synopsis or something. You will have to look through your scheduled recordings to find it. When working on this, I had a program title request 'Undercover Boss' and ended up with a few movies scheduled because it was about undercover cops, probably going after a mob boss.
...
I did a keyword search for the actor and it found 4 results, three TV show episodes and a movie. None of them actually had that actor in it, but some of them had other actors with the same last name and others with the same first name. None of these programs where scheduled to record, however. So it is not clear why it would be colored light green if no programs matching this actor's name are scheduled to record.

Somewhat related question: Three of the four returned results had both first and last name of the actor somewhere in the list of actors. One of them only had the first name, and I could not find the last name anywhere. This led me to look at the XML file to see where it may have found that last name in that program and it turns out that one of the ProducerRole people matched the last name.

So I guess my question is, why populate the ProducerRole if they are not displayed by WMC?

It looks like the rolls that are displayed are:
directors
writers
guest appearances
cast
hosts

For some reason ProducerRole is not displayed. I wonder if it would be better to add producers to the "writer" or "director" section and then add a "character=Producer" (assuming you can use that construct for those roles). At least this way they are actually displayed and not just used for searches (which can be confusing). The other thing that can be confusing is if they search and find the keyword in the short description, as I believe that is only displayed at the bottom when the program is highlighted in the guide, but at least you can see that one if you know where to look.

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StinkyImp

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#26

Post by StinkyImp » Mon Jan 18, 2021 4:23 pm

Sorry! I only check this website and my email in the morning.
garyan2 wrote: Sun Jan 17, 2021 5:21 pmOkay, this is for some old OneTime requests of “Bad Influence” back in 2019. Looks like it was on a station that is no longer part of your lineup… I didn’t account for that when trying to add the channel number and callsign to the list view.
How would I remove "Bad Influence" since it's not in my recording list? It also appears there may be a few more like this one.

Image

garyan2 wrote: Sun Jan 17, 2021 5:21 pmI've tried to send you an updated exe file to check it out, but gmail always kicks back that it couldn't be delivered any time I send an attachment. Let me know if you get them.
I did not receive it in Gmail but I was able to download it from your website this morning. Thank you! :)

kkingsto

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#27

Post by kkingsto » Mon Jan 18, 2021 4:48 pm

StinkyImp wrote: Mon Jan 18, 2021 4:23 pm Sorry! I only check this website and my email in the morning.
garyan2 wrote: Sun Jan 17, 2021 5:21 pmOkay, this is for some old OneTime requests of “Bad Influence” back in 2019. Looks like it was on a station that is no longer part of your lineup… I didn’t account for that when trying to add the channel number and callsign to the list view.
How would I remove "Bad Influence" since it's not in my recording list? It also appears there may be a few more like this one.

Image

garyan2 wrote: Sun Jan 17, 2021 5:21 pmI've tried to send you an updated exe file to check it out, but gmail always kicks back that it couldn't be delivered any time I send an attachment. Let me know if you get them.
I did not receive it in Gmail but I was able to download it from your website this morning. Thank you! :)
Right click on the entries you want to remove, and click "Cancel". Thats what I'm doing to clean up my messy database.

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StinkyImp

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#28

Post by StinkyImp » Mon Jan 18, 2021 4:59 pm

kkingsto wrote: Mon Jan 18, 2021 4:48 pmRight click on the entries you want to remove, and click "Cancel". Thats what I'm doing to clean up my messy database.
Many thanks for pointing out this simple and elegant solution! :thumbup:

It should have been obvious to me... :crazy:

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garyan2

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#29

Post by garyan2 » Mon Jan 18, 2021 8:19 pm

See if this build gives a more accurate indication of scheduled recordings (light green). http://epg123.garyan2.net/downloads/epg ... .6.1.2.zip
- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io

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garyan2

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#30

Post by garyan2 » Mon Jan 18, 2021 8:23 pm

Space wrote: Mon Jan 18, 2021 7:47 am I did a keyword search for the actor and it found 4 results, three TV show episodes and a movie. None of them actually had that actor in it, but some of them had other actors with the same last name and others with the same first name. None of these programs where scheduled to record, however. So it is not clear why it would be colored light green if no programs matching this actor's name are scheduled to record.
I'm thinking YMMV. I had a WishList request for ProgramTitle of 'Undercover Boss' and WMC scheduled a recording of the movie 'Foxy Brown' which had the words 'undercover' and 'bosses' in the synopsis. It may treat People differently when it determines to schedule a recording or not, haven't tried to find out yet.
- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io

Space

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#31

Post by Space » Thu Jan 28, 2021 1:04 am

Does the current release (1.6.1.3) include the changes you made in this special 1.6.1.2 build above? I didn't have a chance to try this and now I am going to update to the latest release build. So I need to know if I should first install this one to see if it fixes things before upgrading to the current release.

Thanks.

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garyan2

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#32

Post by garyan2 » Thu Jan 28, 2021 1:36 am

Yes, v1.6.1.3 includes the improved accuracy of the Transfer Tool in determining scheduled recordings.
- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io

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#33

Post by Space » Thu Jan 28, 2021 3:19 am

Installed latest release and it looks like all of the issues I presented in my post have been corrected, nice! It would be nice to have a way to see every entry, even the ones that you now suppress (the Manual one with the date in the past for instance), just for purposes of being complete and to make sure WMC really is cleaning those up after some time. Perhaps they can be colored red?

Also, have you given any thought to the ProducerRole issue? It's strange that they have this role, but don't appear to use it anywhere, except for it causing confusing matches when you do a search. Does WriterRole even support the character= option? If there is no good option for displaying these, perhaps it might be better to just not populate producers at all, since there appears to be no way to display them and it just causes confusing matches when you do a search. Although I suppose if you really like a producer and set up recordings for their name (I guess you would have to use a "keyword" search?) that would still work.

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garyan2

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#34

Post by garyan2 » Thu Jan 28, 2021 3:34 am

The manual requests that no longer appear is because they are no longer viable requests. There is a flag set in the request basically saying that the request has been fulfilled so it is ignored by WMC/PVR. If you have an old manual request that has not been fulfilled, then it will still show on the right side and might be abandoned after a time... don't know. I don't plan on making those requests visible since I'm sure there are going to be a few folks that do a lot of manual records and I don't want to clutter their list.

There is no character option for the producer role. Just the actors and guest actors. I'd hate to stop populating them, even though they are behind the scenes and not viewable by the user, they are still useful for the xmltv file. Maybe I can make them not serializable for the mxf file... that way I can still use them for the xmltv file. I'll have to think about it some more.
- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io

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