importing shows into Sage Recordings so they can be grouped

[phatjew]

Hi there,

I have been a very happy Sage 2.2.x user since 2004. After nearly 4 years I just upgraded to v.6.3. At first, I upgraded the existing installation, and all of the existing shows showed up in the Sage Recordings screen just fine. Then, because of consistent crashes (probably not related to Sage -- I hadn't re-installed windows XP in nearly 4 years), I had to re-install Windows XP. When I installed Sage, I tried to point it to my video directories, but nothing showed up in the Sage Recordings screen. So, I pointed the "import" screen to the video directories, but of course on the Imported videos screen in Sage doesn't group them by show (as far as I can tell).

I'd like for all of my existing shows (over 100 -- I like to keep shows for a while) to show up in the Sage Recordings screen. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks

[Opus4]

You need to use your old wiz.bin database to have SageTV recognize the old recordings as recorded shows. There's a sticky in this forum with more info -- FAQ: How to move files, change recording dirs, etc..

- Andy

[phatjew]

So, I notice in the thread that big, bold line reading "Note: always create a backup copy of wiz.bin and sage.properties before trying anything listed here."

So, if I didn't do that, am I hosed? My old wiz.bin has been sent to the land of the reformatted hard drive, never to be seen again. I honestly thought that if I still had the shows themselves (which were stored on three other hard drives) I'd be OK. That's how it worked in older versions, and I just didn't do the research to verify that. Is there really no way to add them to my new SageTV database, even by typing them in? For example, I have every episode of The Office saved, and I watch them all the time, and I'd be willing to manually reconstruct a wiz.bin or the new format if someone could point me in right direction.

Thanks.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by phatjew

So, I notice in the thread that big, bold line reading "Note: always create a backup copy of wiz.bin and sage.properties before trying anything listed here."

So, if I didn't do that, am I hosed? My old wiz.bin has been sent to the land of the reformatted hard drive, never to be seen again.

You have to have wiz.bin for SageTV to recognize any recording. You could try manually adding imported videos as recordings using nielm's webserver; see the customizations forum about that.

I honestly thought that if I still had the shows themselves (which were stored on three other hard drives) I'd be OK. That's how it worked in older versions, and I just didn't do the research to verify that.

SageTV has never tracked recordings anywhere other than in wiz.bin. That's why it is important to keep backups of that file.

- Andy

[Fuzzy]

Sadly, this seems to be the single largest design flaw/limitation in Sage. The required information COULD have been stored in the MPG files, and used instead of the iffy wiz.bin, providing come portability to the files. But, after so many generations, this has yet to be changed. The only 'option' is to install one of the metadata plugins, which writes the relevent information into a seperate text file for each recording (.MY files). Not very elagant.

wiz.bin has gotten corrupted a few times for me, and the worst thing, is that sage DOES create a backup automatically upon starting, but it only keeps ONE backup. I had an issue where my computer would automatically reboot a few minutes after startup. This caused the corrupt wiz.bin, which then got repeatedly backed up, erasing the good backup with an empty one. It seems the only way to ensure your favorites and recordings information survives is to use yet another third party tool to automatically back-up wiz.bin, and keep multiple dated copies somewhere safe.

Has there been ANY plans on changing this?