Show ID and Watched Status

[popechild]

I just missed an episode of Rock Star: Supernova (my wife's going to kill me!) because the episode information incorrectly listed it as "Watched." I've had this problem on this show before - they have a performance show and a results show each week, and every week the performance show is listed as "Watched" before it airs, presumably because the performance shows all share the same information. I have to remember to clear the Watched status every week or it won't record. My question is, is there a way I can setup the series so that it will record even when an episode has been "watched." For instance, on Tivo I believe there were settings for First Run, re-runs, or "All episodes" which would record every episode regardless of whether it had been recorded before. Have I missed the way to do that in Sage??

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by popechild

I just missed an episode of Rock Star: Supernova (my wife's going to kill me!) because the episode information incorrectly listed it as "Watched." I've had this problem on this show before - they have a performance show and a results show each week, and every week the performance show is listed as "Watched" before it airs, presumably because the performance shows all share the same information. I have to remember to clear the Watched status every week or it won't record.

I just looked up the show & the airings I see all use unique ShowIDs (EP#). Do your airings have something different for their ShowIDs? With unique IDs, SageTV can track them separately & know which episodes are different. But, if 2 different shows happen to have the same ID, it can't tell them apart.

If your listings are showing non-unique IDs (SH#), then you could try setting the option to force SageTV to treat non-unique IDs as different shows instead of trying to determine if they are the same episode. The option is in the default STV & it uses the epg/advanced_show_redundancy_check property. You would want to set it to false, and it should be set in sage.properties AND sageclient.properties if using a client or service mode.

My question is, is there a way I can setup the series so that it will record even when an episode has been "watched."

SageTV will not automatically record any shows that are marked as Watched, but it will record one if you make it a Manual Recording.

- Andy

[popechild]

Originally Posted by Opus4

I just looked up the show & the airings I see all use unique ShowIDs (EP#). Do your airings have something different for their ShowIDs? With unique IDs, SageTV can track them separately & know which episodes are different. But, if 2 different shows happen to have the same ID, it can't tell them apart.

If your listings are showing non-unique IDs (SH#), then you could try setting the option to force SageTV to treat non-unique IDs as different shows instead of trying to determine if they are the same episode. The option is in the default STV & it uses the epg/advanced_show_redundancy_check property. You would want to set it to false, and it should be set in sage.properties AND sageclient.properties if using a client or service mode.


SageTV will not automatically record any shows that are marked as Watched, but it will record one if you make it a Manual Recording.

- Andy

Hmm... From the looks of my sage.properties and sageclient.properties, both of these settings are already set to false. And yes, the "performance" episodes are all showing the same showID for me (as well as one or two of the "results" episodes).

I'm hoping there's something else I can do besides making manual recordings or re-setting the watched status every week, because that sort of takes away the "set it and forget it" advantages. Is there no way to just tell Sage to "record all" regardless of whether that episode has been recorded? (I'm assuming here that for upcoming shows, Sage automatically sets it to "watched" if that showID has been previously recorded... Is that how it works, or does Sage only set an upcoming show to watched if that showID has been recorded AND actually watched?)

The only downside to having the ability to tell Sage to record every episode regardless of watched status is that it would record things you've already seen, right?

[Opus4]

(I moved this to a new thread, since it didn't really have anything to do with SageMC.)

Originally Posted by popechild

And yes, the "performance" episodes are all showing the same showID for me (as well as one or two of the "results" episodes).

But, what type of ID is it? This FAQ has info about the differnt types of ShowID values and whether an episode will be recorded again.

(I'm assuming here that for upcoming shows, Sage automatically sets it to "watched" if that showID has been previously recorded... Is that how it works, or does Sage only set an upcoming show to watched if that showID has been recorded AND actually watched?)

You have to watch a show or mark it as Watched in order for SageTV to consider it watched. Simply recording it means nothing; but if it is already recorded & the file still exists, it won't record the same show again.

- Andy

[popechild]

Hmm... Looks like it is indeed an EP (episode ID). So Sage thinks that there are unique IDs for each episode, but in fact many of the shows are using the same episode ID (EP). (fwiw, there are some other shows I've noticed this on too, just not any that I have set for series recordings - such as Access Hollywood, which for me has the same exact showID (EP) for every single episode.)

Could this have anything to do with the fact that I'm using an XML guide data loader (Stephanie's)? All of my data is coming from zap2it.

Those questions aside, I'm still unsure why Sage wouldn't provide the opportunity for a "record all" type series setting, given that it's obviously possible for even EP showIDs to be wrong at times. For instance, there's apparently no way for me to set up a series recording for Access Hollywood if I wanted to because every showID (EP) is the same, so since I've watched a single episode before, every episode in the upcoming schedule is already set to "Watched."

Is this a limitation of the base Sage API, or is this something that I could try to customize my STV to work around? Would it be possible for me to create a "record all, regardless of showID" option for myself?

Thanks!

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by popechild

Hmm... Looks like it is indeed an EP (episode ID). So Sage thinks that there are unique IDs for each episode, but in fact many of the shows are using the same episode ID (EP). (fwiw, there are some other shows I've noticed this on too, just not any that I have set for series recordings - such as Access Hollywood, which for me has the same exact showID (EP) for every single episode.)

Could this have anything to do with the fact that I'm using an XML guide data loader (Stephanie's)? All of my data is coming from zap2it.

Probably. I see 2 future & 2 past airings of Rock Star: Supernova on my system, and they all have unique IDs. I'm using the built-in EPG data, which also comes from Zap2It. I thought the XML system you are using had an option to pass along the IDs that were assigned to each airing by Zap2It, instead of creating its own IDs?

Do you need to use XML? I don't know where you are located, but the built in EPG data covers the US and Canada.

Those questions aside, I'm still unsure why Sage wouldn't provide the opportunity for a "record all" type series setting, given that it's obviously possible for even EP showIDs to be wrong at times. For instance, there's apparently no way for me to set up a series recording for Access Hollywood if I wanted to because every showID (EP) is the same, so since I've watched a single episode before, every episode in the upcoming schedule is already set to "Watched."

What you are describing is a problem in the EPG data, in that it shouldn't be assigning the same EP-prefixed ID to every episode. If it is going to use the same ID all the time, it should prefix it with SH. If you get your EPG data fixed, you won't have the particular problem you are describing.

SageTV is designed to intelligently know what it has recorded, what has been watched, etc. If bad/incomplete data is put into that system, it can't do what it should be able to do.

Is this a limitation of the base Sage API, or is this something that I could try to customize my STV to work around? Would it be possible for me to create a "record all, regardless of showID" option for myself?

It might be possible to have some system set up Manual Recordings for every airing of certain shows, but in terms of Favorites & so on, the core handles all of that scheduling, not the STV.

- Andy

[popechild]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Probably. I see 2 future & 2 past airings of Rock Star: Supernova on my system, and they all have unique IDs. I'm using the built-in EPG data, which also comes from Zap2It. I thought the XML system you are using had an option to pass along the IDs that were assigned to each airing by Zap2It, instead of creating its own IDs?

I'll look into this.

Do you need to use XML? I don't know where you are located, but the built in EPG data covers the US and Canada.

I started using XML primarily because all the tv I have is OTA HD. There are 20+ various channels and sub-channels here in LA, and the built-in EPG data only gave me data for about half of the primary channels and almost none of the sub-channels.

Additionally, I liked the option to be able to rename my channels so I could have it say "ABC" for instance instead of "KABC-DT." There were a few other smaller issues that using XML also provided benefits when I started using it that are not as big a deal now because of the FCL plugin...

But primarily, I just hated seeing over half my channels say "No Data" all the time.