Need help troubleshooting duplicate scheduled recordings

[andyhi]

Hi, I'm looking for some guidance for the next steps in troubleshooting a problem with TV episodes being scheduled to record multiple times.

For example:

Scenario 1:
TV series on Discovery and History channels that have a new episode air in a prime time slot and then repeat the episode a couple hours later. Both the original and repeat episode get automatically scheduled to record and both are recorded. I.e. Gold Rush & The Curse of Oak Island at 8:00p and the same episode at 10:00p. (This is *not* a recording error issue during the first airing resulting in the episode being re-scheduled to record later that night... both episodes are set to record as part of the series request days/weeks in advance.) Note: I have the "Prefix episode title with season and episode numbers" option enabled. Both episodes have their title prefixed with the same S0xE0x info and show the same expected episode details/description.

Scenario 2:
If I pull up the list of scheduled series recordings sorted by date, I tend to find many episodes of the same series set to record on a particular day a couple weeks out. (Series set to record *new* episodes only.) I.e. Every Gold Rush episode in every time slot from 9:00a until 7:00p as part of a weekend/weekday marathon. Every Curse of Oak Island episode set to record from 11:00pm until 4:00am. These are obviously repeats of old episodes but are *different* episodes in each time slot. Interestingly, each episode's description has the *SAME* generic info and certainly does not match the actual episode being aired. Also the episode is not being matched / renamed with Season Number, Episode Number appended to episode name. (No SxxExx prefix.)

The issue has gotten progressively worse over the last few months. Also the further out in time that I look for future scheduled recordings, the worse the problem appears to be.


As part of troubleshooting...

I've (repeatedly) cancelled the series recording, waited a bit (minutes/hours), and re-added to have the issue sometimes re-occur immediately and other times re-occur a week or two later.

I upgraded from epg123 v1.2.6 to v1.2.9.

I found an old thread that talked about running a MC specific scheduled task to clean/repair the guide. (This hosed MC's guide/tuner config... WMC Has Corrected A Problem With Your Recording Data, etc.) While researching a solution I found a thread where garyan advised not running this task as it sometimes causes this error with a resolution of wiping the ehome folder to start over. To resolve, I ran epg123 Client Setup Steps 1(clean start)/2/3 and then re-imported the backup of my scheduled recordings the EPG123 1.2.9 install made during the upgrade form 1.2.6. (Thanks garyan for automatically backing up the recordings during upgrade as I forgot to do it manually.)

The steps above fixed most of the duplicate scheduled recordings but not all. However, I've since noticed more and more duplicates, including many 20-21 days out.

I've checked the C:\ProgramData\GaRyan2\epg123\trace.log since upgrading and a have several days history of scheduled runs with no warnings, errors, etc that would indicate a problem with guide updates/imports.


Any thoughts short of an OS rebuild?

Thanks in advance.

-A

[garyan2]

For scenario #1, I'm going to need an example to check it out (what series, and when you see the issue).

For scenario #2, this is expected. When the episode is "generic", WMC will err on the side of caution and treat it as NEW for recording. As those episodes get their specific episode information, then WMC will be able to determine whether the episode is new or repeat and remove from the recording schedule as appropriate. You are more likely to see this scenario for anything beyond 2 weeks... higher probability that the program does not yet have specific episode information. Going out that far, the generic episode is really just a place holder.

May be related to scenario #1.
I have found a quirk in when a series recording request is created using an episode from the guide. It tends to include that episode in the recording request regardless if it matches your requirements of new/repeat. I have the best way to create series recordings is to do a search for the title and create the request from there. <= this only works if there a multiple episodes of the series in the guide.

[andyhi]

Thanks for the reply above.

For scenario 1 - I don't have any future examples at this point. Last night I went ahead and manually cleaned up the recording's list just in case the problem was related to the restore post ehome rebuild (Client Setup Step 1/clean start).

Last night's (Discovery Channel) Gold Rush was one example, but probably not a good one. Premier @ 8p - 10p and then repeat @11p - 1a. However, Discovery merged two series into one two hour airing last night. [Gold Rush s09e14 + Gold Rush White Water s02e02.] I suspect they made this decision in the last week or so to boost the spin off series ratings/viewership... so who knows what the guide data coming to SD looked like and how many times it was changed/updated in the last few weeks.

For scenario 2 - The placeholder explanation makes sense. I don't recall previously checking more then ~1.5 weeks ahead in the scheduled recordings list until troubleshooting scenario 1. I just checked the MC recording list and it's clean up to Jan 25. For 1/25, I have generic (Discovery Channel) Gold Rush episodes scheduled to record hourly @ 3a - 7a, then 3p - 8p, 10p + 11p, 1/26 1a, - 4a. The time slots not listed are filled with the spin off series Gold Rush White Water, which is also in the similar situation. The same for Discovery Channel's Alaska the Last Frontier on 1/27. Every 1hr time slot from 5am - 6pm + 8p, 10p, 11p, 1a, 3a, 4a is set to record as part of a series request. I'll watch these over the next couple of weeks to see how they turn out. I suspect all the older episode repeats may clear up. Then perhaps the new episode and it's re-air 2 hours later may stay on the recordings list.

I'll reply if anything interesting turns up.

[Space]

Scenario #2, yes, this is normal. If an episode is added to the guide, and it does not yet have episode specific information, it is just added as a generic episode of that show. WMC will schedule these to record just to be on the safe side, however, if that particular episode is later updated with episode specific information, it will be properly re-scheduled to either record, or not record based on your settings (or at least it should be, see below).

Scenario #1 I've posted about in the past, and happens to me quite often (so I was surprised when I originally posted this and did not see anyone else respond as also having this problem).

This happens with the Rovi data source as well. Usually I see this when all (or some) airings of an episode are added to the guide as "generic" episodes (as explained in scenario #1 above) and are therefore scheduled to record, but are then later updated with episode specific information. Normally this is supposed leave the first airing episode to record (as long as no conflicts) and remove the scheduled recordings for subsequent airings of that same episode, which DOES happen much of the time.

But when this "bug" happens, the multiple airings of that same episode remain scheduled to record even after being updated with episode specific info. You can manually tell WMC to "do not record" each of the duplicate scheduled recordings and it will only record the airing(s) that you left scheduled (warning: if WMC is unable to record that airing for some reason (power outage, cable outage, conflict) it will NOT schedule one of the other airings of that episode to record due to you telling WMC to "do not record" that airing). Note that it is possible for some airings of the affected episode to NOT be affected by this bug, that is you can have 10 airings of that episode in the guide and only 5 of them are scheduled to record, the others are properly not scheduled (it is not clear why this is, but it may be that the unaffected episodes were added to the guide AFTER the episode specific info was added to the existing episode in the guide).

This ability to tell WMC to not record subsequent airings of a particular episode is interesting, because normally when you tell WMC to not record a specific episode that is part of a Series record, that Series will not schedule that episode to record in the future, it will not record that episode no matter when it airs, so you would think that it would remove the existing pending recordings of all instances of that episode, but it does not.

It would be nice if someone who has the ability and skills to examine the WMC database could look at this and see what weird state these scheduled recordings get in to and if it is something that can be avoided or corrected.