A blatantly missed recording, documented with screenshots and logs. [RESOLVED]

[lysdexical]

I just submitted this to Sage support, but I figured I may as well post here too.

Sage TV 7 has been missing recordings rather often. I keep hoping this problem will go away with each minor update, but it is still happening as of 7.0.18. A few days ago I wiped Sage and all of my tuner card drivers from my system and reinstalled everything, first the tuner drivers and then sagetv. I did keep my sage.properties and wiz.bin files in the process. After all that some recordings are still being missed.

A show aired at 9pm tonight (Stargate Universe, yeah it sucks but it's the only thing left of a once great franchise so I watch it) which absolutely should have been recorded. Around 9:30 I realized the show was not recording, so I took 9 screenshots and a debug log to show that it should have recorded it, and that it didn't.

The first 5 screenshots are attached to this post, I will post the last 4 and the debug log as the first reply. I reduced the color to 8-bit for the screenshots so the files would be smaller.

The screenshot titles pretty much tell the story. Am I missing something? Is there a reason that this Favorite should NOT be recorded, even though all firstruns and reruns should be recorded and it is a brand new episode? I see no conflicts, no errors, the tuner works fine.

It's almost 11pm and according to the Recording Schedule, SageTV has no plans to record the second airing of tonight's new episode either.

Here are some other quirks that I have noticed which may or may not be related to this issue. First, if I add a show as a Favorite and an episode of it is currently airing, the currently airing show may or may not begin to record. If it does begin to record, it does so after a delay of at 3-5 minutes, but often it simply will not start. I thought maybe it only records the episode if a complete airing is not available for that episode in the near future, but then that does not explain the long delay before recording begins. I recall that version 6 would begin recording within a few seconds in this situation. Another quirk is that if I initiate a manual record of a show I am watching, then stop watching the show, then go to the recording options and select Cancel Recording, the recording will not stop but the recording options menu changes as to the options that an unrecorded listing would have. Attempting to tune to another channel warns that the change conflicts with a manual recording, the one that was cancelled. In one case, I started a manual recording of a 2 hour movie and then realized I had a favorite starting in 15 minutes. So I canceled the manual recording, and the behavior I just described occurred, so I tuned to another channel, overriding the 'ghost' manual recording, then stopped live TV completely so that no recording of any kind was going on. 10 minutes later, the favorite still did not record.

Anyone else seeing this behavior or know anything about why it is happening?

[lysdexical]

Screenshots 6-9 and the debug log.

[Opus4]

I'm not aware of any scheduler issues in v7 -- have you checked the older FAQ for this:
Why isn't my Favorite set to record? It falls within the next 3 days, so it should be in my recording schedule.

Look at the parallel schedule view; I'm guessing the tuners are in use tonight, so the scheduler chose a later airing of tonight's episode.

- Andy

[Brent]

How many tuners do you have? That can record that channel?

Also it looks like your show is scheduled to record at 2am. That would show up in your scheduled recordings but you have that screen filtered to talk shows only from the looks of it

[Spectrum]

I caught SGU being not listed to record in my lineup tonight (Geeks unite!) and added it as a manual before it started. I dug a little deeper and the airing tonight @ 2100 EST was not labeled as HD and it was scheduled to record on 10/12 in HD. Yours looks to be the same. This image shows the airing scheduled on 10/12. My guess is the guide data is borked.

Interestingly enough, the airing on 10/12 is still listed as a 1st airing in my guide when it blatantly is NOT. I've noticed this creeping into my guide data more and more in the past few months: things mistagged as 1st airing, incorrect hd tag, etc. Anyone else seeing this trend?

Wow walk away while composing a reply and get beat by 2 people

Brent and Andy I can absolutely confirm that I did not have a tuner conflict and the guide data for both airings: today (10/5) and on 10/12 is incorrect. I was taking screenies and noticed that the 2300 airing is also mistagged as a 1st run and not HD.

[lysdexical]

For the 9PM airing this is NOT the case, the screenshots and the log I attached show this.

Originally Posted by Opus4

Look at the parallel schedule view; I'm guessing the tuners are in use tonight, so the scheduler chose a later airing of tonight's episode.

[lysdexical]

Originally Posted by Brent

How many tuners do you have? That can record that channel?

One, as shown in screenshots 7, 8, and 9.

[lysdexical]

Originally Posted by Spectrum

I caught SGU being not listed to record in my lineup tonight (Geeks unite!) and added it as a manual before it started. I dug a little deeper and the airing tonight @ 2100 EST was not labeled as HD and it was scheduled to record on 10/12 in HD. Yours looks to be the same. This image shows the airing scheduled on 10/12. My guess is the guide data is borked.

Ahhh, that does make sense I guess, if the first HD recording that it is aware of is on 10/12 then waiting would give the best quality as far as sage is concerned. Is there a way to tell it to prefer earlier vs HD? Also, in the airing list shouldn't there be an HD icon on each recording that is listed as in HD? I don't see that on 10/12, but it looks like that is the first episode that it considers to be a firstrun.

[Tiki]

OK, from what you've posted, it looks like the episode is scheduled to record at 2:00am on Tues 10/12, so it isn't missing anything.

So, the real question becomes, "why did Sage choose to record this show next Tuesday instead of at 9:00 or 11:00 tonight?"

From your other screen shots, it appears that Sage has scheduled to record the Colbert Report tonight at 11:00. So, if there is only one tuner that can record the Colbert Report or Stargate Universe, that could explain why Sage chose not to record Stargate at 11:00.

Finally, Sage chose not to record tonight at 9:00, but the current time in your screen shots is 9:35, so it's hard to tell what happened here, but maybe the tuner was not available at 9:00 or you hadn't scheduled it yet at 9:00. So, even though the tuner is available now, Sage decided it was better to just wait until next Tuesday at 2:00am when it could record the whole thing.

Anyway, from what I see here, it looks like Sage is behaving the way it is intended. Now, if it didn't record this episode at all and there were no reported conflicts, that would be a bug.

<Edit> Wow, 5 other posts to this thread in the time it took to type my reply!

[Spectrum]

I would actually just prefer Zap2It getting the data correct and we wouldn't have this issue Although overall they do a pretty good job and the few recurring problems I have had in my lineup have been fixed quickly after reporting it to Sage.

[Opus4]

I didn't see the lack of an HD marker in the EPG data - that almost certainly covers it. There's a FAQ about reporting bad/incomplete EPG data to SageTV so they can ask Zap2it to get it updated.

- Andy

[Fuzzy]

Unfortunately, sage is a slave to the guide data, and has to make the best decisions it can with the info provided. zap2it has gotten quite a bit inconsistent with things like HD tagging and 1st run. However, I think zap2it actually has some decent logic on the 1st run part. Basically, it treats the multiple 're-airings' of the episode in it's debut week as a 1st run (as opposed to a rerun of that episode some months later during a dark week, or a syndicated rerun on another channel). This does sort of make sense, and is actually good as far as sage scheduling is concerned (so your favorites that are tagged as 1st run won't be forced to get the ONLY one tagged 1st, forcing potential unnecessary conflicts).

The HD tagging being borked is unfortunate, and I don't know why it is such. Unrelated to this issue, but is there a reason you still have SYFY enabled in your channel lineup? I'd get rid of that and keep everything simple with just SYFYHD in there, personally.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by Spectrum

Interestingly enough, the airing on 10/12 is still listed as a 1st airing in my guide when it blatantly is NOT. I've noticed this creeping into my guide data more and more in the past few months: things mistagged as 1st airing, incorrect hd tag, etc. Anyone else seeing this trend?

Generally, an episode is considered "1st run" any time it is aired during it's first week or so. It is not meant to signify the first airing, but just the initial run. So, this particular issue isn't really a problem with the guide data. But, I have seen other mistakes (such as live football games not being marked 1st run, but re-broadcasts of games from 10 years ago sometimes are marked 1st run).

[lysdexical]

Originally Posted by Tiki

Finally, Sage chose not to record tonight at 9:00, but the current time in your screen shots is 9:35, so it's hard to tell what happened here, but maybe the tuner was not available at 9:00 or you hadn't scheduled it yet at 9:00. So, even though the tuner is available now, Sage decided it was better to just wait until next Tuesday at 2:00am when it could record the whole thing.

This favorite has been set up for over a year, and as the debug log shows there was no recording or playback activity going on at 9pm.

[lysdexical]

Thanks all for your replies, it sounds like the culprit is bad F/HD flags in the EPG data.

Thinking back, I'll bet this is the culprit for most of my missed recordings as they are all first run HD shows. The only one I can remember that was not an F/HD show was from the situation I described where a manual recording initiated and then canceled, then 10 minutes later a favorite does not record. The episode was set to record before the manual recording was started but then it did not return once the manual recording was cancelled. The show was Three's Company, which has many airings of the same episode in a given week, so my best guess is that Sage moved the recording to a later instance when the manual recording started to avoid conflict, but then did not move it back because of the weird 'ghost' recording effect where it continued with the manual recording after it was explicitly cancelled (it was not a favorite, just a one-off movie).

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by lysdexical

This favorite has been set up for over a year, and as the debug log shows there was no recording or playback activity going on at 9pm.

Right. But, as someone else pointed out, it looks like the Zap2It guide data did not mark tonight's airings as being HD (I don't think you could tell this from the screen shots that you posted, but the other poster had some shots that showed the lack of HD marker on tonight's episodes but showed the marker there on next week's episode). So, assuming that your Zap2it data was the same as his, it would make sense that Sage would prefer to record the show next week in HD versus tonight (when it thinks it is not in HD).

There is a lot of complexity in Sage's scheduling algorithm, so sometimes it can be difficult to piece together the logic from a few screen shots.

The key thing is that it did schedule the recording for sometime in the near future, it didn't just ignore it completely.

If you are curious about this, you can probably still go to your program guide and scroll back to 9:00pm to see if that airing was marked as "HD" or not.

[Skirge01]

Nice research there, Spectrum! Prior to your post, I was thinking I had the same issue and started digging, but I missed the HD part, as well. You're absolutely correct. That was my issue, too. This is why I generally don't even worry about these things. I can't recall the last time I missed a recording because SageTV "forgot" to record something... if it's ever happened. In general, SageTV is smarter than I am when it comes to this sort of thing.

Regarding the guide data, this is why I don't use the "first run only" option. I know that if I already marked it "watched", then it won't be recorded anyhow. I'd rather have an episode I already watched be mistakenly recorded than an episode I've never seen be skipped. Lesser of two evils, as they say.

[Spectrum]

All in a days work

I can't think of a single time Sage has just "forgotten" to record something. I've had missed recordings for every other reason though. Busy tuners, bad tuners, power outage, bad EPG data, ... the list goes on. But in my experience it has never been the scheduling algorithm

[lysdexical]

Originally Posted by Spectrum

All in a days work

I can't think of a single time Sage has just "forgotten" to record something. I've had missed recordings for every other reason though. Busy tuners, bad tuners, power outage, bad EPG data, ... the list goes on. But in my experience it has never been the scheduling algorithm

This has been my experience as well up until v7, which is why it was so baffling. I found it hard to believe that somehow the new version has a worse scheduling algorithm, so I'm glad it turned out to be the EPG data instead.

I do remember v6 being much more responsive to scheduling changes, however. If I reorder some favorites or change some options, by the time I navigate to the recording schedule it would usually be updated to reflect the changes already. v7 seems very sluggish in that regard. The recording schedule also seems to take a long time to reflect conflict resolution choices as well.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by lysdexical

I do remember v6 being much more responsive to scheduling changes, however. If I reorder some favorites or change some options, by the time I navigate to the recording schedule it would usually be updated to reflect the changes already. v7 seems very sluggish in that regard. The recording schedule also seems to take a long time to reflect conflict resolution choices as well.

By default, version 6 created a recording schedule for the next 3 days; in version 7, it is 14 days, covering all the EPG data for he next 2 weeks. You can set this in Detailed Setup -> Customize -> Number of Days to Schedule Recordings.

I'm guessing you are now using the longer lookahead time, have more channels and/or tuners, or both.

- Andy