Cross Linked Metadata Discussions (Any BMT Version)

[stuckless]

NOTE: This should be resolved as of Sage 7.0.13 and BMT 4.5

The cross linked metadata issue is something that has been around since the 3.x version of BMT. I'd like to get a general consensus on when/how this happening, and so, I'd like people to document their experiences and theories here, so that I can have a single place to reference the issues.

Cross linked metadata refers to an anomaly whereby one sagetv media item mysteriously gets the metadata associated to another sagetv mediaitem, in such a way, they they appear "linked". When editing the metadata for one item in the web ui, it appears to update other items as well.

To date, I think this is only happening for SageTV recordings, but if you've experienced this for other items, then please share your experiences.

When sharing your experience, please let me know the SageTV version and your BMT version. Also, if you've had a past experience with a specific bmt version, then let me know about that as well.

Hopefully by grouping the experiences together in a single thread, we might be able to see a pattern emerge.

Thanks

[Fuzzy]

I think my first comment would be... what is actually being crosslinked, is it just the fanart title, and list of fanart images? if so, do those really need to be explicitly set in the metadata? can't that be garnered from the title by phoenix on request?

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I think my first comment would be... what is actually being crosslinked, is it just the fanart title, and list of fanart images? if so, do those really need to be explicitly set in the metadata? can't that be garnered from the title by phoenix on request?

What appears to be cross linked at this point is any metadata field. But in 4.2, I do not update the core metadta for items that have existing epg info, and as such the following custom metadata fields are set... MediaTitle (used as fanart title), SeasonNumber, EpisodeNumber, and MediaType. Those 4 fields are used by the Fanart APIs to quickly resolve fanart.

Phoenix supports resolving fanart without those fields, but it's very expensive, and disabled by default. Basically it has to, in real time, filename scrape the title to determine the MediaType and MediaTitle using a limited set of filename scrapers. Also for recordings, it becomes even more expensive, since it would need to actually go out to tvdb and resolve the season info, for season specific fanart.

So while, it is possible to do fanart lookups without the custom metadata fields, it's not recommended, and the root issue would still exist, which is why is the metadata becoming linked to other recordings in the first place? Is this a bmt issue? Core sagetv issue? etc. At this point, i'm pretty sure it's a bmt issue, but i'm not sure where to look.

[Tiki]

Actually, in my experience, I have never seen the cored metadata get corrupted. Version 3.x would overwrite core metadata with downloaded data and this could cause some problems (for example the episode ID would get overwritten which meant that Sage could no longer sort by ID properly and it might record the same show again, since it wouldn't recognize it as being watched), but this was not the cross-linking problem.

From what I could tell, it was only the custom metadata that was being cross-linked. In most cases, the STV does not display this custom metadata, so you wouldn't even see it unless (a) you look in the BMT web UI or (b) you have fanart enabled. Since fanart relies on these custom metadata fields it will display the wrong pictures when this cross-linking happens.

[JREkiwi]

On my system with BMT 2, 3 and 4 and SageTV 6.6, 7.0

I've only every seen MediaTitle, MediaType and EpisodeTitle crosslinked.
It only happens with the automatic plugin.
It only happens on recordings on my PVR-500 from my STB.
Every recording from the startup of SageTV recorded on my PVR-500 has the MediaTitle, MediaType and EpisodeTitle values of the first show recorded.

Editing the values on any single recording via SetMediaFileMetadata, changes it on every recording made on my PVR-500 since SageTV started.

Restarting SageTV fixes the crosslinking for that group of recordings and editing the values via SetMediaFileMetadata effects only the correct MediaFile. All new recordings after the restart will have the MediaTitle, MediaType and EpisodeTitle values of the first recorded MediaFile after the restart.

It NEVER happens on my digital recordings. All digital tuners are configured with encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream=false.

John

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by JREkiwi

On my system with BMT 2, 3 and 4 and SageTV 6.6, 7.0

I've only every seen MediaTitle, MediaType and EpisodeTitle crosslinked.
It only happens with the automatic plugin.
It only happens on recordings on my PVR-500 from my STB.
Every recording from the startup of SageTV recorded on my PVR-500 has the MediaTitle, MediaType and EpisodeTitle values of the first show recorded.

Editing the values on any single recording via SetMediaFileMetadata, changes it on every recording made on my PVR-500 since SageTV started.

Restarting SageTV fixes the crosslinking for that group of recordings and editing the values via SetMediaFileMetadata effects only the correct MediaFile. All new recordings after the restart will have the MediaTitle, MediaType and EpisodeTitle values of the first recorded MediaFile after the restart.

It NEVER happens on my digital recordings. All digital tuners are configured with encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream=false.

John

Are you saying your seeing this with direct calls to setmediafilemetadata? if so, it sounds like an initialization issue in the sage api's itself. if you can reproduce this reliably, sounds like it needs to be brought up with them via a bug report. It would be a pretty significant bug.

[JREkiwi]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Are you saying your seeing this with direct calls to setmediafilemetadata?

I'm saying that after a MediaFile has it's metadata crosslinked with another file via the automatic plugin then any change to SeasonNumber, EpisodeNumber, or MediaType via SetMediaFileMetadata will change the metadata for both MediaFiles. After a SageTV restart it won't change the metadata for both files. I've only ever seen the crosslinking occur via the automatic plugin.

John

[Brent94Z]

The crosslinking just started a couple weeks ago for me and last night something happened for the fourth time that I've noticed...

The first time I noticed this was after a recording of "Monster Quest". After that recording it seemed like nearly everything was getting the fanart for "Monster Quest"... just the art, not the description. Then the same thing happened with "Leverage" where when "Leverage" was recorded, it got the correct fanart but then afterwords, all or nearly everything seemed to get "Leverage" as well. Then, on Friday, "Friday Night Lights" was recorded first and then everything after that that night got "Friday Night Lights" for the art. Now, last night, I had 4 recordings with the first one being "Lie To Me". Well, "Lie To Me" did NOT get the "Friday Night Lights" fanart and did get its own fanart but, all of my recordings following "Lie To Me" got the "Lie To Me" fanart.

So, it does seem to be something possible related to caching. One thing I'll keep an eye on now is to see what causes it to finally change and be correct. I *think* but not 100% on this that my recordings that are getting crosslinked don't have their own specific fanart and instead I'd normally see a frame from the first part of the video. So, while I need to watch this further, so far it looks like the fanart for one show is continuing for shows that don't have specific fanart UNTIL another show is recorded with its own specific fanart and then that show's fanart is used until another show is recorded with specific fanart. All the "oddball" recordings get fanart from the last show with actual fanart until another show that does have fanart is recorded... then the process starts over with the most recent show's fanart. Does that make sense to anybody besides me? LOL!

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Brent94Z

So, it does seem to be something possible related to caching.

I did some digging again into the caching that is used by bmt, which is very little. But, bmt does cache downloaded content from tvdb for performance reasons. Now, if somehow, the cached files were being referenced incorrectly, then we would see failed fanart, since the the XML that would be loaded would be from the wrong series. BMT, create new object instances for each search item, so there is no cached/reused object instances those cases.

[Brent94Z]

Originally Posted by stuckless

I did some digging again into the caching that is used by bmt, which is very little. But, bmt does cache downloaded content from tvdb for performance reasons. Now, if somehow, the cached files were being referenced incorrectly, then we would see failed fanart, since the the XML that would be loaded would be from the wrong series. BMT, create new object instances for each search item, so there is no cached/reused object instances those cases.

LOL! I didn't even read this before I posted in the other other thread but it appears that I may have found exactly what you are talking about. Hopefully so! But, it is weird that there appears to only be a handful of us seeing this yet if it was writing the URL incorrectly (which is what it seems?) then you'd think it would be doing this for everyone??? Weird.

Sorry for posting in multiple threads about the same thing. Just wanted to make sure we were on the same page

[Narflex]

Sean sent me an email about this and after reading JREKiwi's post about it only happening on the PVR500 I did some digging and found the issue. It was due to how the core was reusing media format objects when they didn't change (because they never did w/ our code)....but plugins setting alternate metadata values would change them. So this is modified for 7.0.12 to never reuse those objects and won't be a problem after that. (7.0.12 should be out sometime this week)

Sorry for any inconvenience caused by this.

[Brent94Z]

Excellent! Glad it got figured out. Thanks!

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Narflex

Sean sent me an email about this and after reading JREKiwi's post about it only happening on the PVR500 I did some digging and found the issue. It was due to how the core was reusing media format objects when they didn't change (because they never did w/ our code)....but plugins setting alternate metadata values would change them. So this is modified for 7.0.12 to never reuse those objects and won't be a problem after that. (7.0.12 should be out sometime this week)

Sorry for any inconvenience caused by this.

Thanks Jeff! I'm glad you were able to identify the issue... I was ready to strip out TV support altogether, since I couldn't find a reasonable fix within the BMT codebase

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Thanks Jeff! I'm glad you were able to identify the issue... I was ready to strip out TV support altogether, since I couldn't find a reasonable fix within the BMT codebase

So now that THATS taken care of, sounds like its time to put back in the auto TV import to recordings feature.... ;-)

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

So now that THATS taken care of, sounds like its time to put back in the auto TV import to recordings feature.... ;-)

Absolutely. I've been gradually stripping out TV functionality from BMT (as it related to directly updating metadata), because of this very issue. Now that I know it will be resolved in core, I'll add back the ability (options) to auto-import tv shows as recordings... and add back the options from the UI as well.

That being said... i'll be on vacation (out of town) for about 3 weeks... so don't expect anything too soon

[skyeclad]

I just manually updated a TV show to get metadata(Caprica). I then noticed that 2 DVD's also received the metadata descriptions within Sage not artwork. When I go to BMT, I see Caprica as the name for the 2 DVD's but when I open the DVD within BMT it has their correct description metadata.

Is this the crosslinking issue and how can I re-establish the correct metadata within Sage?

[cmaloney]

Unfortunately this is still a problem with 7.0.12.0. I just completed a new installation of SageTV, installed BMT and got it all configured. No matter what I seem to try I have 3 movies that all linked together so that whenever I fix one, the other two also display the information for the fixed movie. Any ideas how this problem can be fixed?

Below is the info from my status screen:

Phoenix
Version
	
2.0.6
sagex.api Version
	
7.0.12.0
Automatic Metadata/Fanart Lookups Enabled
	
true
Fanart Enabled
	
true
Fanart Folder
	
C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\FanArt
SageTV
Version
	
7.0.14.236
Required Version
	
7.0.11
Java Version
	
1.6.0_17
Server
	
true
Recordings Used Diskspace
	
0.00 G
Library Import Scan in Progress
	
false
JVM Max Memory
	
1,040,512 M

[Fuzzy]

Are these files you've Just imported, or were they imported previously back before the xrosslinking was fixed?

[cmaloney]

It was a fresh install of 7.0.14. I had 6 previously but I moved the folder out of the way so that 7.0.14 installed in the default location without getting any previous settings. The only plugins I installed are: BMT, MyMovies, SageMC (not used currently), Phoenix fanart, IMDB search, and all the dependencies of these plugins. After manually fixing a single movie using the web UI, any additional movie fixes will use cause the additional movies to link with the first movie. They all show up as duplicates in the web UI, but with the correct picture name (but not the correct fan art).

[Tiki]

Right, but were the problem shows recorded or imported into the Sage database before or after installing 7.0.14?

I think once they've been corrupted they will stay corrupted even if you upgrade to a newer version of Sage. But if new recordings are still getting corrupted, that would indicate that the problem hasn't been completely solved.