Big Release... 1.8.0.0 is here.

[garyan2]

Yes, you can select SUCCESS, UPDATE AVAILABLE, WARNING, and ERROR to send on.

Sent from my SM-G781U1 using Tapatalk

[stuartm]

Awesome, you are the man

[IT Troll]

Just to let everyone know. I just released 1.8.0.8 which includes the option to send email notifications for EPG123 and EPG123 Client.

Ooh, that's nice. As someone who runs Media Center full screen 24/7 I can sometimes miss problems.
Presumably I can set this up to use Google's free SMTP.

[garyan2]

I should have posted this with the announcement, but here is what the email setup looks like. Should work no problem with any SMTP server.

email.jpg (26 KiB) Viewed 829 times

EDIT: Maybe not. Looks like the smtp client I am using does not work with gmail (not advanced enough).
EDIT2: Well maybe. Looks like it is considered a "less secured app" (not controlled by Google) and you may have to do something to allow it. Looks like you can create a custom password for the App and then use that, but haven't had time to look too hard.

[IT Troll]

So despite Google still publishing guides on setting up SMTP, as of May 2022, they no longer support standard account login from "less secure" third party apps.

Instead, you have to have 2-Step Verification enabled and generate a separate App password for EPG123 to use.

Once that's done, it works fine.

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Subject: [TEST] EPG123_GUI on HTPC
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

This is a test message to verify proper email configuration on HTPC.

[garyan2]

Awesome. I just posted EDIT2 on my post above saying pretty much the same. Glad to know it is doable. I've tested a couple other SMTP servers that I have access to without a problem.

[Space]

I know this is not the purpose of this, and I know that it really has nothing to do with EPG123, but I have been wanting to set up my WMC PC so that I get an email when the free disk space on the recording drive drops below a certain threshold.

I was wondering if you would be willing to add an additional "send on" for this condition.

Again, I know it has nothing to do with EPG123, so I completely understand if you don't want to add this option.

I've been looking at doing it myself, but every time I look up how to send an automated email via SMTP from Win7 I ran in to road blocks so just never got to do it. I also thought that gmail no longer supported it, but apparently there is a way to do it based on this thread...

The plan was to set up a new gmail account just for sending these automated emails. It appears that setting up the account with an "app password" makes it less secure, so using an account other than one of my daily email accounts sounds like the way to go.

[garyan2]

IF I were to do something like that, it would be part of the client run to check freespace on the recording drive. What kind of threshold do you think would be appropriate? I wouldn't want a percentage based threshold since drive sizes can vary greatly.

[garyan2]

Here's a concept output when the client starts. Setting some threshold combination of percent and GB available can set the status to a WARNING.

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[7/5/2023 9:59:25 PM] ===============================================================================
[7/5/2023 9:59:25 PM]  Activating the epg123 client GUI. version 1.8.0.8
[7/5/2023 9:59:25 PM] ===============================================================================
[7/5/2023 9:59:25 PM] *** Windows 11 Home, 64-bit [Version: 10.0.22621.1848] (22H2) ***
[7/5/2023 9:59:25 PM] *** .NET Framework 4.8.09032 is installed. ***
[7/5/2023 9:59:25 PM] *** Windows Media Center [Version: 6.3.9600.16384] is installed. ***
[7/5/2023 9:59:25 PM] [ INFO] Recording Drive C:\ (NTFS, Fixed) has 232.358 GB available. (49.3% of 458.054 GB used)

[Space]

Setting it as a warning is probably fine rather than a separate "send on" category.

I was thinking of a user-settable threshold. A static percentage is probably not the best way to do it because depending on the size of the recording drive that can be a huge difference in remaining space (10% of 200GB is a lot different than 10% of 5GB). I tend to want to be notified when I have about 20 hours of recording space left, which on my system is about 120GB of remaining space. How much total space I have allocated to WMC is really not relevant. So I would like to see a user settable threshold based on MB/GB rather than percentage.

It might also be a good idea to calculate the remaining space based on how much of the recording drive was allocated to WMC (you can allocate less than the whole drive to be used by WMC, even though I always allocate the entire drive), but I'm not sure how difficult that is to do since you have to know how much space has been used up by WMC recordings (although that might be easily obtainable through the WMC API).

[IT Troll]

Perhaps a threshold to trigger a WARNING and a threshold to trigger an ERROR. For the folks who only have error notifications enabled.

Just when you think there is nothing left to add to EPG123's rich feature set...

[StinkyImp]

I've been looking at doing it myself, but every time I look up how to send an automated email via SMTP from Win7 I ran in to road blocks so just never got to do it.

Some years ago I worked on an email/text/notification utility and based on my experience... Gary deserves some congratulations and thanks on this new feature. Mine worked for me but the hoops were too extensive to roll it out to the world.

[garyan2]

RE: Recorder storage
Here's what I'm thinking I will do. I will let WMC tell me whether it expects to delete any recordings, or fail to record any programs in the future due to "DiskFull". Anything within 24? hours will be an ERROR; anything within 3? days will be a WARNING.

I can certainly still report the status of available storage based on the allocated space and drive space, but I think the above would be better all-around than setting an arbitrary threshold or requiring the user to try and determine what works best for them. There are way too many variables based on recording request settings whether space is an issue or not.

[Space]

RE: Recorder storage
Here's what I'm thinking I will do. I will let WMC tell me whether it expects to delete any recordings, or fail to record any programs in the future due to "DiskFull". Anything within 24? hours will be an ERROR; anything within 3? days will be a WARNING.

I can certainly still report the status of available storage based on the allocated space and drive space, but I think the above would be better all-around than setting an arbitrary threshold or requiring the user to try and determine what works best for them. There are way too many variables based on recording request settings whether space is an issue or not.

I would be hesitant to do it this way.

I have seen a few times where I look in the "to do" list of upcoming recordings in WMC and it doesn't think it has any space issues for the next 48 hours and then the next morning I find that programs did not record due to lack of space. I'm not sure why this happens, but it has happened many times, which is why I try not to rely on this indicator and instead monitor the free disk space.

I have also seen the opposite, where it indicates that an upcoming recording will not record due to lack of space, but it has plenty of space (it had to record a 1 hour show that should take up about ~6-8 GB of space and there was ~20GB free).

How much space will be needed for a recording is based on the bitrate of the channels/shows it will be recording, so it would have to be predicted based on historical data (prior recordings) and I just don't think WMC is very good at it, in fact, I would call it "broken" based on my experiences.

It could certainly be implemented this way to see how it goes, but I think an option to just report when the available recording space is less than a certain user specified GB threshold should also be an option.

[kkingsto]

Can WMC report a tuner conflict or lack of tuners? I've had cases where I've tried to record things but not enough tuners. Had to decide if I wanted to tune this or that. Is this something that can be reported?

[garyan2]

I understand what you are saying and will consider. The WMC expectations are pretty rough calculations. It uses the HD flag of the schedule entry to determine whether to calculate file size based on 2.5MB/s for HD or 985.5KB/s for SD. It doesn't account for VBR or compression in its calculations.

Here is what using WMC expectations would look like.

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[7/6/2023 2:02:37 PM] ===============================================================================
[7/6/2023 2:02:37 PM]  Activating the epg123 client GUI. version 1.8.0.8
[7/6/2023 2:02:37 PM] ===============================================================================
[7/6/2023 2:02:37 PM] *** Windows 11 Home, 64-bit [Version: 10.0.22621.1848] (22H2) ***
[7/6/2023 2:02:37 PM] *** .NET Framework 4.8.09032 is installed. ***
[7/6/2023 2:02:37 PM] *** Windows Media Center [Version: 6.3.9600.16384] is installed. ***
[7/6/2023 2:02:37 PM] *** Recorder storage drive C:\ has 96.981 GB available. (3.0% of 100.000 GB used) ***
[7/6/2023 2:02:38 PM] [ERROR] WMC anticipates limited storage starting at 7/6/2023 10:58:00 PM and will start deleting existing recordings.
[7/6/2023 2:02:38 PM] [WARNG] WMC anticipates running out of storage starting at 7/8/2023 9:58:00 AM and cancelling scheduled recordings.

[garyan2]

Can WMC report a tuner conflict or lack of tuners? I've had cases where I've tried to record things but not enough tuners. Had to decide if I wanted to tune this or that. Is this something that can be reported?

Definitely not as "easy", but possible.

Code: Select all

[7/6/2023 3:35:00 PM] ===============================================================================
[7/6/2023 3:35:00 PM]  Activating the epg123 client GUI. version 1.8.0.8
[7/6/2023 3:35:00 PM] ===============================================================================
[7/6/2023 3:35:00 PM] *** Windows 11 Home, 64-bit [Version: 10.0.22621.1848] (22H2) ***
[7/6/2023 3:35:00 PM] *** .NET Framework 4.8.09032 is installed. ***
[7/6/2023 3:35:00 PM] *** Windows Media Center [Version: 6.3.9600.16384] is installed. ***
[7/6/2023 3:35:00 PM] *** Recorder storage drive C:\ has 95.741 GB available. (4.3% of 100.000 GB used) ***
[7/6/2023 3:35:00 PM] [ERROR] WMC anticipates limited storage starting at 7/6/2023 9:58:00 PM and start deleting existing recordings.
[7/6/2023 3:35:00 PM] [WARNG] WMC anticipates running out of storage starting at 7/8/2023 10:58:00 AM and cancelling scheduled recordings.
[7/6/2023 3:35:05 PM] [ERROR] CHiPs - Wheels of Justice at 7/6/2023 4:00:00 PM will not be recorded due to a tuner conflict.
[7/6/2023 3:35:05 PM] [ERROR] The Outer Limits - Nightmare at 7/6/2023 4:00:00 PM will not be recorded due to a tuner conflict.
[7/6/2023 3:35:05 PM] [ERROR] Snapped - Barbara Cameron at 7/6/2023 4:00:00 PM will not be recorded due to a tuner conflict.
[7/6/2023 3:35:05 PM] [ERROR] Snapped - Celestine Payne at 7/6/2023 5:00:00 PM will not be recorded due to a tuner conflict.

[stuartm]

Hmm, am I misremembering? Doesn't WMC warn you at the time of scheduling a recording if there are tuner conflicts? (i.e. you would see them right then and an e-mail would be sort of redundant)

[garyan2]

It does, but that will only cover you for when you set up the recording and what is in the guide. If there are tuner conflicts in the future, I don't know if it will notify you or not.

[Space]

I understand what you are saying and will consider. The WMC expectations are pretty rough calculations. It uses the HD flag of the schedule entry to determine whether to calculate file size based on 2.5MB/s for HD or 985.5KB/s for SD. It doesn't account for VBR or compression in its calculations.
...

So you are saying that WMC just uses a static multiplier? No wonder it is so bad at this. I haven't looked recently, but when I first got FiOS, there could be drastic differences in the bitrate used by different HD channels. Some channels were almost twice the bitrate of other channels (the broadcast networks were usually very high bitrate compared to the cable networks, like 20 mbps vs. 12 mbps). So using a static multiplier instead of basing it on historic bitrate of old recordings seems like a bad decision. I think FiOS reduced these bitrates today, but I really haven't looked closely recently... I know that some channels use h.264 and have very low bitrates.

Hmm, am I misremembering? Doesn't WMC warn you at the time of scheduling a recording if there are tuner conflicts? (i.e. you would see them right then and an e-mail would be sort of redundant)

If you are setting up a new recording, it will tell you if there is a conflict and allow you to resolve it, however if two existing scheduled recordings (usually Series recordings) come in to conflict due to schedule changes, then you will only see an indicator of it if you look in the "to do" list after the guide update and indexing. I would assume this flag is something that can be detected in the DB using the API.

EDIT: If you are going to add tuner conflict reporting, I would like to request that it only be for conflicts that occur within the next 7-8 days (or allow you to specify), there are often way too many conflicts due to generic listings after that period for me, particularly for networks that don't like to add episode specific info until about a week before air time. Sometimes they don't do it until a few days before, so not much that can be done about that unless you start adding exclusions for certain channels or shows, or handle "generic" listings differently which might be getting too much in to the weeds.