Known Issues in BMT

[stuckless]

This is a sticky on the Known issues in BMT. This is not a discussion thread, so please don't post questions here.... They will be deleted. As I get PMs or as I notice issues in the other threads, I'll create an entry here, if I feel it is needed.

The purpose of this thread is NOT to be an issue manager for BMT, but rather an area where I'll post warnings about some BMT behaviours that are not easily resolved.

[stuckless]

This issue has been ongoing since 3.x and it still exists today in the 4.x betas. There is no short term fix on the radar, since I can't reproduce the issue, despite the fact that several people have been able to provider clear instructions on how to reproduce the issue.

The Problem
After doing a manual update using the web ui, all future recordings appear to inherit the fanart and metadata of the manually updated item.

The Solution
This has been fixed as of Sage 7.0.13, and bmt 4.5. The root issue was a combination of bugs in bmt and core sagetv.

You can discuss your cross linked woes here.

Fixing Files that are linked
The best thing to do is
* remove the files from your import folder (move them to a location outside of your imports area).
* delete all .properties in the folders
* tell sage to scan for new media (this will simply update the wiz.bin state to reflect they are gone)
* ensure you are running the latest version of bmt (and phoenix-core)
* move the files back into the imports area
* tell sage to scan for new media (if the bmt automatic plugin is installed, it will fetch metadata/fanart)
* verify if the items are crosslinked from the web ui (check the ExternalID of each file that you suspect is crosslinked, they should all be different, and they should have a non empty value)

[stuckless]

This has recently been brought to my attention, and I have no way to verify this at the moment, but it sounds reasonable.

The Problem
In Sage6, when using the automatic plugin, some recordings may get broken up into multiple files. The reason is that when sage starts a recording, it asks the automatic plugin for metadata. This process may take a long time depending on the site, metadata and fanart. If the process takes to too long, then sage may abort the recording and try again.

The Solution
If you suspect that BMT is causing this issue, then I'd recommend removing the automatic plugin and use the web ui (or alternate stvi import) to do metadata lookups AFTER the recording is completed.

I will look at optimizing the automatic plugin so that it spends less time fetching metadata, and I may look at adding a timeout in the automatic plugin so that if metadata/fanart isn't returned in a set # of seconds, then I'll just return with nothing, so that SageTV isn't being held up.

[stuckless]

The Problem
In 3.x, if you directly update the Wiz.bin when you fetch metadata for TV shows, then it will erase the Channel information associated with that recording. In doing so, SageTV will no longer automatically remove those recordings if it needs space.

The Solution
Upgrade to the 4.x (may be beta). In 4.x you have much more control over whether or not to directly update the Wiz.bin database. Also, in 4.x it will never overwrite a Sage Recording metadata, it will simply fill in the blanks, such as Season and Episode #s.

[stuckless]

BMT has never handled TV box sets very well. 3.x did have some support, but it causes some other side effects, so it was removed in version 4.0.

The Problem
BMT 4.x can't handle titles named, "Series - S##D##"

The Solution
3.x has some support and builds >= 4.0.27 does have the same support that was in 3.x. Other tools such as DVD Profiler and MyMovies may provide support for these types of collections.

Since BMT cannot actually get episode specific information for these types of sets, you will only get Series information and Fanart.

[stuckless]

The Problem
After upgrading from Sage 6 to Sage 7, and then installing the BMT plugin, the plugin fails to load.

The Solution
Remove duplicate jars using this tool.