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Schedule list shows programmes already recorded.

My symptoms aren't quite the same, but I'm sure it's all connected.

On both of my boxes, it seems like the block of code which searches forward in time for future recordings is no longer working. For example, I last did a retune on Friday (to bin off all the timers and start again) and I set up all my week's recordings. All series links set to the following Friday - as far as the EPG could see at that time.

On Saturday "Secrets of the Royal Palaces" recorded successfully, but no timer set for next Saturday's recording. I've got a full EPG and the series CRID for the following Saturday's episode is the same as the one just recorded. The empty timer just sits at the end of the timer list, as though the series has finished.

On Sunday, "Around the world in 80 days", "Call the Midwife" and "The Tourist" all recorded successfully, but again no timers set for the following Sunday recording. Just empty timers now at the end of the list.

It's like my boxes have a fixed EPG end point (ie currently Friday 21 January) and can't "see" anything beyond then.
 
mike_m said:
Rebooting hasn't helped mine - they get power-cycled every morning at 4am: into standby mode, power off, 5 mins down, then power up, then out of standby. This is to get around the problem that sometimes occurs when a hummy has locked up, but it is still visible on the network and thus doesn't get diagnosed by a ping.
Click to expand...
That's odd. On my HDR, a tidy shutdown and reboot should invoke the housekeeping functions which includes generating basic thumbnails for recordings. Your first post screenshot doesn't have thumbnails for some recordings.
 
bottletop said:
a tidy shutdown and reboot should invoke the housekeeping functions which includes generating basic thumbnails for recordings.
Click to expand...
Yes, it should. Maybe it's not being given enough time to shut down before the power gets cycled, and maybe that's because it's in delinquent half-awake.
 
Black Hole said:
Yes, it should. Maybe it's not being given enough time to shut down before the power gets cycled, and maybe that's because it's in delinquent half-awake.
Click to expand...
Good point.
mike_m said:
Rebooting hasn't helped mine - they get power-cycled every morning at 4am: into standby mode, power off, 5 mins down, then power up, then out of standby. This is to get around the problem that sometimes occurs when a hummy has locked up, but it is still visible on the network and thus doesn't get diagnosed by a ping.
Click to expand...
Try powering down tidily - eg via the remote control for, say 10-30 minutes. Make sure the unit powers down by itself to the extent the hard drive stops spinning. Eg feel the top of the HDR, wait until faint vibration stops. After that power it up normally and check the schedules. In addition maybe perform a maintenance fix-disk if you can spare the time. I suspect your technique of daily power cycle has gone wrong and is basically pulling the power out of the HDR before it had the chance of a tidy shutdown. Also - are there lots of queued tasks?
 
antb said:
My symptoms aren't quite the same, but I'm sure it's all connected.

On both of my boxes, it seems like the block of code which searches forward in time for future recordings is no longer working. For example, I last did a retune on Friday (to bin off all the timers and start again) and I set up all my week's recordings. All series links set to the following Friday - as far as the EPG could see at that time.

On Saturday "Secrets of the Royal Palaces" recorded successfully, but no timer set for next Saturday's recording. I've got a full EPG and the series CRID for the following Saturday's episode is the same as the one just recorded. The empty timer just sits at the end of the timer list, as though the series has finished.

On Sunday, "Around the world in 80 days", "Call the Midwife" and "The Tourist" all recorded successfully, but again no timers set for the following Sunday recording. Just empty timers now at the end of the list.

It's like my boxes have a fixed EPG end point (ie currently Friday 21 January) and can't "see" anything beyond then.
Click to expand...
I'm seeing the same thing, and it seems to have been happening since the start of the New Year. It generally sorts itself out, but I had one instance (Top of the Pops on BBC4) which didn't and I had to delete the series and add it again.

It's almost as if the new entries in the EPG have a flag set indicating they're "Not Live", causing the Humax to ignore them. At some point that flag gets flipped and they get picked up. It's only a guess as I've no idea if there is such a thing in the DTV spec, and it doesn't account for them being picked straight away up if you delete the series and add it again.
 
bottletop said:
That's odd. On my HDR, a tidy shutdown and reboot should invoke the housekeeping functions which includes generating basic thumbnails for recordings. Your first post screenshot doesn't have thumbnails for some recordings.
Click to expand...
We don't have thumbnails on either of the HDR-Fox T2's when the programmes are first listed; they usually don't appear until after we've actually played the recording, although occasionally thumbnails appear on programmes we haven't accessed yet - there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for when this happens. I've found this is actually quite useful, as a programme with a grey thumbnail immediately stands out as one we haven't watched yet! I've always assumed that this has something to do with the CF 'Flatten' feature running on both machines.

bottletop said:
Good point.

Try powering down tidily - eg via the remote control for, say 10-30 minutes. Make sure the unit powers down by itself to the extent the hard drive stops spinning. Eg feel the top of the HDR, wait until faint vibration stops. After that power it up normally and check the schedules. In addition maybe perform a maintenance fix-disk if you can spare the time. I suspect your technique of daily power cycle has gone wrong and is basically pulling the power out of the HDR before it had the chance of a tidy shutdown. Also - are there lots of queued tasks?
Click to expand...
I have powered down both machines for extended periods of time, and it doesn't affect the issue. I have also rebooted them both from the WebIf. The schedule displays remain as they were.
I don't think the daily power-down can really 'go wrong' - the machines have a scheduled 'sleep' and wake-up' 10 mins apart, and the power-down is handled by a cron task running on a dedicated Raspberry Pi that pings the Humaxes every hour on the hour, and power cycles them if they're not awake. The only failures that happen are if the mains power is off, in which case the power cycle happens anyway. The RPi keeps logs of everything, so I can easily see if anything is not happening.

Black Hole said:
Yes, it should. Maybe it's not being given enough time to shut down before the power gets cycled, and maybe that's because it's in delinquent half-awake.
Click to expand...
That's entirely possible - I don't really know what's happening within the Humax in Standby mode! They get 5 mins in standby before the power-cycle, and then five minutes afterwards.
 
mike_m said:
They get 5 mins in standby before the power-cycle, and then five minutes afterwards.
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How do you cope with clock changes?

mike_m said:
cron task running on a dedicated Raspberry Pi that pings the Humaxes every hour on the hour, and power cycles them if they're not awake.
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Aha!

I was thinking of using mechanical timers, but that would have a clock-shift issue. Now thinking of smart plugs, I guess their scheduler corrects for time.

mike_m said:
they get power-cycled every morning at 4am: into standby mode, power off, 5 mins down, then power up, then out of standby. This is to get around the problem that sometimes occurs when a hummy has locked up, but it is still visible on the network and thus doesn't get diagnosed by a ping.
Click to expand...
It would be better if you did this at 4.30am, that way you would eliminate the "let's go looking for an OTA whether you like it or not and even though there aren't any" syndrome.
 
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Black Hole said:
It would be better if you did this at 4.30am, that way you would eliminate the "let's go looking for an OTA whether you like it or not and even though there aren't any" syndrome.
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I'd be nervous about doing that, as I wouldn't want to upset the Gods of PVR who might reach down through the airwaves and curdle the milk in our fridge, or worse!
 
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mike_m said:
We don't have thumbnails on either of the HDR-Fox T2's when the programmes are first listed; they usually don't appear until after we've actually played the recording, although occasionally thumbnails appear on programmes we haven't accessed yet - there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for when this happens.
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There is. The standard operation creates thumbnails when you shutdown (that's what all the disk activity is) or when you play the recording.
Custom firmware packages may create thumbnails at other times, depending on what you have installed/setup.
 
prpr said:
There is. The standard operation creates thumbnails when you shutdown (that's what all the disk activity is) or when you play the recording.
Custom firmware packages may create thumbnails at other times, depending on what you have installed/setup.
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Well, that's not been my experience in the last few years - we simply don't get thumbnails for programmes we haven't watched, even if the hummys are shut down for power cuts or other reasons (and, of course, they are powered off every night anyway). I shut down one machine manually for half an hour today, to test bottletop's idea about the schedule display problem - and after rebooting, the programmes recorded yesterday still don't have thumbnails, though one that we watched this evening acquired a thumbnail once we'd started watching. I have always blamed the Flatten utility, but I really haven't a clue. It doesn't worry me - as I say, it's quite useful for letting us know what we haven't watched yet.
 
Earlier in the thread I mentioned I was running fixdisk and would do Clear persistent EPG data. Having done both of those the box goes into standby fine but series link after a few days is still very broken. I'm going to have to babysit and manually schedule any future recordings. This is how it looks right now, these unscheduled programmes are listed in this coming Sunday's EPG, plus the next Panorama this coming Monday.


chrome_UfkMXMeLvf_proc.jpg

Could it be the transmitter sending out dud series link info, seeing as not everyone here is having this issue? I'm on the Heathfield transmitter.

Edit: some Series CRID info:
Unscheduled "The Green Planet" has a Series CRID of: FP.BBC.CO.UK/M/LY59
Upcoming "The Green Planet" Series CRID is: fp.bbc.co.uk/m/LY59
 
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Black Hole said:
Not necessarily. The OP has not confirmed the unit is indeed shutting down properly. Thumbnails are generated during controlled shutdown (ie not loss of power), not boot-up. See Things Every... (click) section 18.
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Yes, you're quite right - duh! - mea culpa. Thanks for the link - I think I'd actually read that section a long time ago, but obviously wasn't paying enough attention. I put both machines in standby for 45 mins, and now they both have a full complement of thumbnails (except for the odd mpeg file I've put on). I guess they've never been in standby mode long enough to get as far as the most recently recorded programmes. So today I'll reschedule the sleep times so that they get a good night's rest - well, half an hour anyway - before power down. I suppose I could re-configure the cron task to leave them undisturbed for the whole night...

However, the issue reported by Aaron still remains - I'll post about that separately.
 
Aaron said:
Earlier in the thread I mentioned I was running fixdisk and would do Clear persistent EPG data. Having done both of those the box goes into standby fine but series link after a few days is still very broken. I'm going to have to babysit and manually schedule any future recordings. This is how it looks right now, these unscheduled programmes are listed in this coming Sunday's EPG, plus the next Panorama this coming Monday.
Click to expand...
Yes, I have the same issue with The Tourist (BBC1), Around the World in 80 Days (BBC1), Hidden Assets (BBC4) and Dark Woods (More 4). They all show up on the schedule as having indeterminate days and times, yet they all appear correctly in the EPG - but without the red dot, so presumably they won't record unless I re-enter them in the schedule.

Aaron said:
Could it be the transmitter sending out dud series link info, seeing as not everyone here is having this issue? I'm on the Heathfield transmitter.
Click to expand...
I'm on the Hannington mast. If there were a problem with the transmission, wouldn't there be widespread complaints - not just Humax users?
 
Update - as of just now (5.15pm, 18/01/2022), all of the scheduled programmes are now showing correctly, both in the WebIf and in the media>yellow-button display.
Is that the same for you, Aaron?
 
mike_m said:
Update - as of just now (5.15pm, 18/01/2022), all of the scheduled programmes are now showing correctly, both in the WebIf and in the media>yellow-button display.
Is that the same for you, Aaron?
Click to expand...

No, Traffic Cops on Ch5 became a casualty too. Just now I wiped all of Sunday's unscheduled programmes, re-added them, and then noticed my existing panorama and traffic cops schedule for Monday now shows up with a date and time, although its also telling me it needs to record yesterday's Panorama & Traffic Cops as well. No idea what's going on.
 
mike_m said:
Update - as of just now (5.15pm, 18/01/2022), all of the scheduled programmes are now showing correctly, both in the WebIf and in the media>yellow-button display.
Is that the same for you, Aaron?
Click to expand...
Nothing for me just yet, either. Currently anything from Saturday onwards is sat waiting and unscheduled.

Looking back to last year's occurence of this behaviour, it all self - fixed on 15th Jan. Strange that this has now happened 2 years on the trot around very similar dates.
 
antb said:
Looking back to last year's occurence of this behaviour, it all self - fixed on 15th Jan. Strange that this has now happened 2 years on the trot around very similar dates.
Click to expand...
My thoughts exactly. I'll be interested to see what happens during the next week or so.
 
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