WMC 8.1 Recordings Being Mysteriously Deleted

[java007md]

Similar to the problems in another thread for WMC7 at: http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... f=5&t=4800, I am experiencing a problem with recordings being automatically deleted without any obvious rationale. I'm not 100% sure when this started, but we did upgrade from Window 8 to Windows 8.1 recently. Prior to this problem popping up, WMC was performing quite reliably.

There is well over 700GB of free space on the drive (931GB total space) allocated for recordings. I have tried reducing the allocated recording space amount in WMC, rebooting, then increasing to the maximum available drive space and rebooting, with the thinking that making such a change might correct a registry entry. The behavior continues.

I deleted all the scheduled series recordings and recreated them with 'keep until space is needed' and a small number of recordings (3-5) for each series. (Some) shows still seem to disappear within a day without any record of the deleting showing in the series history. The recording event does show up indicating the start and end time, and the shows are visible after the recording is completed - at least for some period of time.

As an example, I recorded Horizons on BBC America yesterday, and 60 Minutes. Both were showing in the recorded shows listings last night. When I checked again today, the Horizons recording is still available for viewing, but 60 Minutes is no longer available. Viewing the series history information provides no indication that the recording was deleted, much less an explanation.

Even manually scheduled recordings (from setting the recording from browsing the guide and selecting individual showings) are showing the same behavior.

Has anyone developed a troubleshooting guide for methodically checking for the root cause of problems such as this? Is a reinstall the easiest way to restore normal functionality?

Suggestions and/or pointers to other posts would be appreciated!

[java007md]

Mystery solved. It appears that the wmc-dedupe script (from http://www.fourteenminutes.com/code/wmc-dedupe/) that was working for well over a year ran into problems recently - probably due to either the Windows 8.1 upgrade or a change in the program information received from FiOS. Disabled the task that ran the script every afternoon and that should resolve it.

[mrsilver]

Hi author of wmc-dedupe here.

Sorry about that. Thankfully a nice chap who helped me when Microsoft changed the meta-data structure for Windows 8 has already emailed me a log file and I'm just about to send him an update to test. As soon as he confirms that it works then I'll post it up on the website.

[mrsilver]

I've updated wmc-dedupe to version 1.5 which fixes this issue.

More information in this TGB thread.

[java007md]

Thank you mrsilver!