Questions on Archive settings & Favorites

[-=Jeff=-]

What exactly happens when a video is marked Archive?

I have about 15 or 16 Shows in my Favorites. Is the favorites settings backed up somewhere?

My system had a major issue yesterday, not sure what it was, but when I got it working again, all my Channels were messed up for my HDHRs.

Then today I noticed one of my shows was not being recorded, somehow in all the chaos of issues yesterday I lost ALL of my Favorites along with the settings.

I think I have everything back the way it was with exception of a couple shows I think, but is there some place where sage might back it up?

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by -=Jeff=-

What exactly happens when a video is marked Archive?

Basically, all it does is prevent it from being auto-deleted for space. Being flagged as such could be used for filtering and grouping items as well in certain customizable views.

Originally Posted by -=Jeff=-

I have about 15 or 16 Shows in my Favorites. Is the favorites settings backed up somewhere?

Favorite settings are stored in the WIZ.BIN file. It is a proprietary database that sage uses for favorites, viewing history, guide data, recording metadata, and more. It is backed up each time sage is started to WIZ.BAK, but this is most often insufficient, as the backup gets overwritten each time the service starts, so many times, if you've had problems, you've restarted multiple times trying to sort it out.

Originally Posted by -=Jeff=-

My system had a major issue yesterday, not sure what it was, but when I got it working again, all my Channels were messed up for my HDHRs.

Then today I noticed one of my shows was not being recorded, somehow in all the chaos of issues yesterday I lost ALL of my Favorites along with the settings.

I think I have everything back the way it was with exception of a couple shows I think, but is there some place where sage might back it up?

Most of us simply back-up the critical files (sage.properties, sageclient.properties, wiz.bin, etc) daily to another location. there are a few batch files that people have developed floating around here to do just that.

[-=Jeff=-]

Thanks Fuzzy,

never knew that about the Archived flag

I will do a search for the bat backups people developed or i will work something out. in the 3 years I have had sage this was the first major issue.

interesting thing was all my recorded stuff still showed but was marked as Archived which it was not before. Anyway I think I have it back to normal now... I hope

[-=Jeff=-]

My system had a major issue the other night..

I got most of it working but this AM my son called because of group of their show recording only show 2, yet there are 20 on my server (Remote access is a wonderful thing)

I tried changing this to true in the sage.properties. Referenced from here:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...610#post265610

advanced_video_file_recovery=true

I stopped the Sage Server and then started it again after the change.

So I need a way to get SageTV to detect the videos.



I am also thinking of switching Sage off of the WHS I have and using WHS for PC back-up and photos only and put SageTV on my Win7 Pro machine (32bit system) (AMD 4200+ x2) but will start a hardware thread on that

* merged *

[PiX64]

if you are sure the videos are still on the server, then i would first go into BMT and check to make sure the metadata on the files is still correct, and they didn't get switched to Movie, or some other name like for example SpongeBob rather than Sponge Bob Squarepants...

then from BMT i would start a refresh library scan.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by -=Jeff=-

Thanks Fuzzy,

never knew that about the Archived flag

I will do a search for the bat backups people developed or i will work something out. in the 3 years I have had sage this was the first major issue.

interesting thing was all my recorded stuff still showed but was marked as Archived which it was not before. Anyway I think I have it back to normal now... I hope

Sage 7+ stores metadata in the video files, and will recognize them still when imported. This is why the recordings were still available.

[Opus4]

I think your issues are related to the same thing, so I merged them so people don't try to answer one question w/o knowing the rest of the story.

It sounds like your old database file is missing due to whatever original issue your system had. As was mentioned above, your newer recordings from v7 are still recognized as recordings because they have metadata stored inside the recording files. Your older pre-v7 recordings are not in the new database file nor do they have metadata stored inside them, so those videos will be imported instead.

If you have a copy of wiz.bin from before the problem, you could try restoring it while SageTV is not running (save the current wiz.bin file just in case). The old database will contain the info for the old Favorites, recordings, watched history, etc.

- Andy

[-=Jeff=-]

PiX64,

what is BMT? And Yes i played a video file direct with VLC to confirm they are there. Directory shows more then 2 for the shows (The Mr. Men Show)

Andy,

yeah thanks for the merge..

The odd thing is that the Videos in question are The Mr Men Show. these were all recorded in SageTV 6. I switched in V7 in Nov. and I think that is the last copy of Wiz.bin I have

if the Wiz bin from November will work then I can copy it and try it. Although since then I added Comskip and Commercial detector so I am not sure if that will cause issues or anything.


I just looked remotely on one of my machines.. they are all now in the videos section in SageTV. is there a way to move them back OR is there a good way to organize them in the video section and leave them there?


I still wish I knew what happened, I was gone and my wife was unable to watch anything, the HD100s could not see the Server, but I could remote in and see all the PCs and Server, SageTV was running according to the Server (WHS) when I got home, and I got the machine rebooted there was a Memory exceeded error. I am pretty sure it was because I was trying to run Comskip on a show in progress, which I knew would bite me.

I still might move Sage to my win7 machine just due to playback jitters with WHS

Thanks for the help so far

[Fuzzy]

comskip/commercialdetector will not cause any of those problems. It does not alter the recording or the database at all. It simply reads the recording, and writes to a separate text file stored with the recording. The more likely cause of the 'memory' error you are looking at might be the C drive being full on WHS. If you use a lot of PlayOn this can happen, as I believe it stores it's 'recordings' on the C drive by default. The drive being full will definitely lead to WIZ.BIN corruption (I've seen it).

[-=Jeff=-]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

comskip/commercialdetector will not cause any of those problems. It does not alter the recording or the database at all. It simply reads the recording, and writes to a separate text file stored with the recording. The more likely cause of the 'memory' error you are looking at might be the C drive being full on WHS. If you use a lot of PlayOn this can happen, as I believe it stores it's 'recordings' on the C drive by default. The drive being full will definitely lead to WIZ.BIN corruption (I've seen it).

Interesting.. I did move playon from the WHS to my Win7 machine since when ever I use play on it would studder. I have 2 playon licenses (accidentally bought a second) and I didn't uninstall play from the WHS, but did the other day.

I did not think comskip/commercialdetector would corrupt the database, I figured something else caused it.

If I go to an older Wiz.bin (pre-comskip install) what issues if any will it cause?

If the shows stay in the videos section i am fine with that, but is there a good way to organize them for appearance in the videos menu instead of one long list?

is the video quality any different being in a the videos menu? I would assume not.

[Fuzzy]

No real complications from using an old wiz.bin, it just won't have any of the data that was generated after it was backed up. (so any favorites changed since then, any watched history - which is used by intelligent recording, if used, and the metadata for any shows added/recorded after that point). The v7+ recordings would still end up in recordings, everything else would go to the video library.

[-=Jeff=-]

So since I have not really used the full potential of SageTV.. Is there a way to move recordings classified as shows to the videos menu?

Then in the videos menu is there a way to create categories for them?

I am thinking move most of the kids shows that are no longer recorded to the Videos section (even some of my older stuff to there as well)

is that even possible?

[-=Jeff=-]

UPDATE:

just checked it again and all my favorites I re-entered yesterday are gone.

I made copies of the Sage.properties, sageclient.properties and wiz.bin, then I copied the last known good ones and it seems to be okay. When I get home I will channel scan my HD channels as I think they changed but all should be good

I will also set up a back up to run and copy/ back up those 3 files daily

Thanks Guys

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by -=Jeff=-

UPDATE:

just checked it again and all my favorites I re-entered yesterday are gone.

I made copies of the Sage.properties, sageclient.properties and wiz.bin, then I copied the last known good ones and it seems to be okay. When I get home I will channel scan my HD channels as I think they changed but all should be good

I will also set up a back up to run and copy/ back up those 3 files daily

Thanks Guys

Is your C drive full on the WHS?

[-=Jeff=-]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Is your C drive full on the WHS?

no it is a 20gig partition with 5 gig remaining..

the 15gig seems high

I am tempted to move the SageTV to a win7 machine but i wonder how well it would work to have the drives still in the WHS running over the network. I need to get a couple HD to trasfer all the recorded data if I did swap though

[Fuzzy]

There's nothing inherently bad in using WHS as your server, and I definitely wouldn't recommend splitting sage from it's recording drives. Any number of things could have caused the wiz.bin corruption (failing harddrive, power failure, etc - none of which would be any different in win7.

[-=Jeff=-]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

There's nothing inherently bad in using WHS as your server, and I definitely wouldn't recommend splitting sage from it's recording drives. Any number of things could have caused the wiz.bin corruption (failing harddrive, power failure, etc - none of which would be any different in win7.

Right I have been using WHS for 2 years and this is the first time I had something go quite wrong. It is nice to have one machine have most everything on too.

My WHS was a re-purposed Dual core AMD (3800+). I have another Dual core AMD (4200+) that I have Win7 Pro on and all it is doing right now is running Play-on (which I off loaded from the WHS machine) I would switch to it for Sage Duty, but it only has 2 SATA ports (main drive is IDE) and I would want more space. I do like the Drive pool on WHS, one place for all shows. if I did Win7 I would need to specify the drives, which is not really a bad thing

[Fuzzy]

The question I always ask, is WHY are you using WHS for your server? What WHS features do you use? I ask, because the drive pool is actually NOT as good as keeping individual drives, as far as sagetv recording is concerned.

[-=Jeff=-]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

The question I always ask, is WHY are you using WHS for your server? What WHS features do you use? I ask, because the drive pool is actually NOT as good as keeping individual drives, as far as sagetv recording is concerned.

I setup the WHS to host everything in one spot, but honestly I think if I moved Sage off of the WHS it might be the better option.

I use the WHS to back up all my machines 4 laptops and 2 desktops. it is the central place for photo storage, documents and music. I think if I left that alone for just that and used one of my desk tops for Sage that would be perfect. I also use WHS for my X10 Active home control since it is the 'main' server.

I think I could get by with my AMD Athlon 4200+ X2 as my sage machine (running win7Pro) it has 2 empty Sata ports, assuming it would recognize a 2 TB drive I could do 2 right away to transfer recordings from the WHS. then add an eSata port with an external enclosure.

[-=Jeff=-]

okay, now I cannot get the CommercialDetector plug in to be shown in the Customize menu. it says it installs and is enabled but not sure why I cannot see it.

I installed the Playon plug in just fine.

looked at my 4200+ X2.. MB will not support what would need for Drives and cards ( need 2 analog cards still and I have only one slot.

plus only spots for 2 SATA HD..

What next.. reinstall Sagetv on WHS to get Commercial Detector working?