Windows Media Center no longer recording series

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gbwelly

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#174902 10-Jun-2015 12:04

I am running windows media center on windows 8.1. I use EPG collector to gather Freeview MHEG5 guide data over DVB-T in another room on my server. On the media center box I am using Big Screen EPG to import it. For the first week the media center worked perfectly, but now it cannot identify a show as being part of a series. It therefore doesn't offer the open to record a series, and the existing series' marked to record are never scheduled to record.

It has been suggested that my guide data does not contain the series ID information required by media center.

Is anyone else having this issue, or has seen this issue before?

Can someone please help explain how I can check the contents of my XMLTV file to verify this?

Cheers

SJB

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#1322102 10-Jun-2015 13:30

What setting have you got on the Output tab for EPG Collector for the format of episode tag?

I think you should try 'Valid season and episode numbers only' first or 'BSEPG compatible'.

Either format creates an episode-num tag in the XMLTV file.

mdf

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#1322138 10-Jun-2015 13:54

I haven't had this problem, but my EPG information has been playing up of late - I've had plenty of recordings show up with "synopsis not available".

I've just been to have a play, and everything seems to be working well now (Windows 8.1, MediaPortal 1.8, Geekzone EPG collector) so not able to diagnose further right now.

There do seem to be some other threads on here about issues/changes to MHEG data (e.g. http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=126&topicid=173834).

gbwelly

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#1322150 10-Jun-2015 14:05

I've tried testing the XMLTV data against a Windows 7 media center and it works fine. I was using the BSEPG format previously, tried the Valid season..etc option too, no change. Now looks like the ball is back in the Media Center/BSEPG court. Currently the media center is a smoldering mess, better get it at least back to the previous state before the family get home :-)

I'm thinking it's a Win8.1 Media Center issue, same data, same BSEPG version on Win 7 works fine. Then again, it took a week to manifest, so it could be a BSEPG issue too.. :(

mdf

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#1322649 11-Jun-2015 09:38

Apologies in advance if this is a dumb comment, but if it worked for a week, is the problem in getting automatic updates of the EPG data? Freeview provides EPG data for 8 days in advance, so you may have had a week's worth of data, but if your scheduled updates aren't working, this information might not be getting renewed.

gbwelly

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#1322699 11-Jun-2015 10:33

No I have new data coming in, I can record one-off shows, it's just that media center doesn't realise that the show is a series.

Current thoughts:

1. It never worked and because I forgot to disable inband guide data for a day I happened upon an EIT test run of the 7 day EPG which was being used.
2. Media center has some sort of corruption due to me changing regional registry settings to enable Netflix

I got these observations about my XMLTV file from Niall the author of BSEPG:

"No series/episode id's are provided (ie. epnum element with info
like series=1, episode 2) hence it needs to make this up by looking at
unique title/broadcast information.

No episode Titles are present (SubTitle) - hence it won't be able
differentiate between same episode shown at two different times.

No Repeat Flag available (as above - won't be able to detect new
episodes vs reshowings)."

However I believe this has always been the case with my guide data and it does work on my windows 7 test machine, allowing me to record series.

mdf

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#1322749 11-Jun-2015 11:59

You've already gotten further than me if you were able to get the Netflix plugin to work inside WMC on Windows 8.1. I could never get it to go.

For testing at least, it might be worth giving MediaPortal a go. It will take the output from the EPG grabber without anything else needed to intermediate (recording a whole series certainly works for me using MP). It might let you at least narrow down what's going wrong (that said, I don't know enough detail to say whether WMC and MP do different things with the EPG data). If it works, you might be able to set something up just using the MP backend/server. Personally, I don't mind the MP front end but WMC is probably still a bit slicker.