RS sometimes misses first episode of series

[rivergo1d]

Has anyone else found this problem? I've noticed it on occasion when coming to view series, but today I just spotted the following problem for a series I'm trying to record Hangs head in shame "Made In Chelsea" (for my wife ... sigh).

The search is setup for E4+1 with a time between 20:00 - 22:59. Showing matching events shows a flurry of episodes starting from next Monday evening, but no RS has been scheduled. Also for next Monday (early hours of the morning) it successfully found and scheduled American Pie, so the RS is working for other programmes.

Does it have any known bugs in this area?

 

[Black Hole]

First thing is have you actually checked the schedule on the target device? You might find it is there already, just not showing on RS.

 

[rivergo1d]

Thanks for the suggestion, but there's no mention of it in the schedule, even after I've rebooted the Humax to flush out any pending updates.

 

[MymsMan]

Sometimes schedule events go missing between RS and the actual Humax schedule - this is long-standing but rare/random enough to defy systematic debugging.
For example over he weekend I used the 'Record this showing instead' option in RS Visual schedule and it displayed popup boxes saying that it had successfully unscheduled the original and successfully scheduled the alternative. But in practice only the new schedule occurred but the original wasn't removed.

There is also a bug in how the webif (and RS) handle selecting for recording the second or subsequent episodes of a series, Using the humax remote All episodes are listed for recording, The webif instead only schedule the event you selected but also marks the episode before the one you selected as Last viewed which often (but not always) stops that episode being recorded.
I have a fix for this problem but it awaits the return of @af123 before it can be published.

Either could be occurring in your RS auto case.

When you look at Matching Events does it show any of them as Notified?
You may need to Reset Matching events and wait overnight to see if it works when given a second chance

 

[rivergo1d]

Thanks for the explanation, that's very helpful. I might knock together a little script which leaves all the heavy lifting to RS, but doublechecks that searches matching EPG entries are translated into recording event submissions. I cut down my favourites list to avoid garbage being matched (says the man recording Made in Chelsea) but occasionally things I like pop up on a niche channel and it's nice to see when that happens, without having reordings of old series automatically scheduled.

I'll give it one more night in case it picks it up tomorrow, and then I'll try resetting the matching events.

Interesting - it does say it was notified, but on this date: 2018-03-05 08:12:50

Does it think it's an ongoing perpetual series match as Made In Chelsea seems to be put on several times a year? I've had a few "resets" a while ago where I manually reinstated some series recordings. M.I.C. was not on at the time so I just left it to pick up the start of the next series, ie next Monday.

 

[Black Hole]

Interesting - it does say it was notified, but on this date: 2018-03-05 08:12:50

That'll be why it hasn't done it again - for whatever reason it is now considered "stale".

I'll give it one more night in case it picks it up tomorrow, and then I'll try resetting the matching events.

Why wait? Just do it.

without having reordings of old series automatically scheduled

I have those things set to email rather than schedule - then I can review and act as required having been alerted.

 

[MymsMan]

RS is using text matching of titles rather the SCRID identifiers to identify matching events so can't easily tell the difference between long running series and new seasons of a drama series.

Broadcasters often make a mess of the series crids so it can be more reliable to use RS to schedule individual events rather than to schedule series.

For example Pick forgot the series crid on several episodes of the new series of Elementary and also scheduled some of those episodes in the early morning rather the normal time slot. This years Glastonbury programmes were a mish mash of new highlights programmes and repeats (using the original scrids) so could only reliably scheduled as single events.

 

[rivergo1d]

Thanks all, resetting the matches did work and I have it auto-scheduled now.

So, are there any guidelines on when matches need resetting? I think RS manages to identify new series year after year, but is it best for series which occur twice or more a year, like M.I.C., or which are long running and barely finish one series before starting another, like Casualty, to manually reset the matches after a series ends?

 

[Black Hole]

As mentioned above, the most reliable thing to do is match events rather than series. That way each programme with a unique programme CRID will be flagged/scheduled instead of only matches with unique series CRIDs. The disadvantage is that recordings will be made as individual programmes, ie not in series folders.

Apart from its "remote" capability, the huge benefit of RS is that it searches for pattern matches rather than only series CRIDs (as per setting series recordings via the EPG). This means RS can pick up the common broadcaster error where the transmitted series CRID changes mid-series, when a series recording scheduled by EPG would break at that point. If set to search and schedule new series matching the title, RS will thus trigger a new series schedule because of the new S-CRID... so long as that S-CRID hasn't been used before. However, by matching the event rather than the series, it won't matter if the S-CRID has been used before.

You should not need to reset matches on a regular basis. Series recording schedules remain valid on the HDR-FOX for three months after the last recording made, so any resumption within three months should work fine (and if it is a new S-CRID, RS will flag it up anyway). I guess RS also expires the S-CRID record on the same timescale (otherwise it wouldn't work properly).

Your specific problem on this occasion seems to be a corrupt record rather than a systematic fault, and resetting matches will simply open the floodgates to re-recording everything you have recorded before when it repeats (and it will). Resetting matches is a diagnostic tool rather than a daily driver.

 

[MymsMan]

I think the safest is to manually reset a series after the last episode of the previous series has aired, but it is easy to forget and not easy to automate since there is no clear end of series indication, not all programmes have 1/8 or 3 of 6 in the synopsis

You might want to take a look at my new schedchk package (available under advanced packages in the catalogue). This is designed mainly to spot late changes to the schedule but it also includes checks for scrid changes which spots new series of a programme in the same time slot which happens on BBC when they start a new series of a long running programme like Pointless.

No automation can ever be perfect and nothing actually beats going through the EPG at least once a week to to look for programmes that are not highlighted for recording where expected and for potentially interesting new programmes that wouldn't be found by any automated rules