Plugin: Sage Recording Extender 4 (SREv4)

[clarenceb5]

Will the 2014 IIHF World Junior Championship be a monitored event?

[wayner]

Good question - I think Slugger uses ESPN's website to monitor events so it may depend on whether they carry the games, which is unlikely since no one outside of Canada cares. The good thing is that it shouldn't matter as the games are played without too many interruptions and I don't think there is OT until the playoffs.

[Slugger]

Well I do use tsn.ca for everything these days except NCAA events. Seems tsn.ca even has a scoreboard page for the WJHC tournament. I question just how "live" that scoreboard will be, which is the determining factor in just how effective an event monitor can be. I also would need to add a monitor for it to the web service.

Holiday things going on this weekend so time is more of an issue than anything so let's just say I will look into it, but no promises.

[Slugger]

Well points to tsn.ca for maintaining a consistent structure in their scoreboard pages. Turns out there was no real work on my part other than telling my web service about the new monitor. The monitor is now live on the web service. However, there are a couple of caveats:

First, today's pre tournament game between Canada and Finland is almost over (or maybe already over), yet the scoreboard page has no live status of the game. This is not a good sign. However, this could be just because it's pre tournament and maybe actual tournament games will be updated live on that web site. You need to be careful of this if you're going to use the monitor because if tsn.ca just updates the page with the final score whenever they get around to it, your recording could end up being extended for a very long time unnecessarily.

Second, the EPG title for these games is just "Hockey" and then in the subtitle it has "IIHF WJHC...", but SRE doesn't like that, it works on the title first and "Hockey" is just too generic (i.e. Spengler Cup games have the same title, etc.). So in order to monitor games from this tournament, you will have to override the title of the games in SRE to:

IIHF WJHC Hockey

With that title (and the team names in the subtitle), SRE will pick up the monitor.

Again, be warned that the web page being used to monitor is definitely not live or near-realtime for pre tournament and if that carries over to next week then this monitor is really useless. If you try it and notice this problem, please let me know so I can just remove the monitor from the web service.

[Slugger]

I will definitely be creating a monitor for Men's hockey. Presumably Women's hockey will be rather easy as well so I'll be including that.

Are there any other event monitor requests for the Olympics? Team based sports work best, but any event can be monitored as long as you can find a (near) live web site with the results as they happen. Preferably, the site is a major sports web site (espn.com & tsn.ca being preferred since all of my current monitors are based on these two sites, but any site will do).

I can only guarantee Men's hockey (and probably Women's) but am willing to try some others if there are any requests. Again, a valid request for a monitor must include a link to the web site to be monitored.

[wayner]

That will help those of us here in Soviet Canuckistan but will that help folks in the US as NBC is notorious for not showing Olympic events live, they wait until primetime. Especially since the time delta to Sochi is 8 hours from EST (I think).

[Slugger]

Yeah, that's a good point. But we'll be ok because you're going to have to override the title on these airings for it to attach to an event monitor anyway so if you're stuck with tape delayed coverage from NBC then that's ok because the default will be not to attach to an event monitor. If you're located in a place that realizes tape delayed sports coverage is so 1987 (#JabAtAmerica) then just override the title & teams so the recording attaches to the appropriate event monitor.

On an aside, I'm not quite old enough to remember the details and I certainly didn't have access to time shifted channels at the time, but there was a time when things like the NFL were showed tape delayed on the west coast, right? I mean what did people do if their team was the Raiders and they played in the east and you didn't see the game until 3 hours after it was played? I guess in the late 80s (and even early 90s this was still being done?? Maybe later than that??) you just had to avoid the radio and you'd never know the score and then huddle around the tv 3 hours later like the game was live? I got to thinking about that one day and laughed because when (like right now) I'm recording a game I have to go dark on all things social media and yet usually someone texts me a score or a smart ass comment. I just laugh at the thought that something as big as the NFL would show tape delayed games. Anyway, off to watch the hockey game that I started recording 90 mins ago.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by Slugger

but there was a time when things like the NFL were showed tape delayed on the west coast, right? I mean what did people do if their team was the Raiders and they played in the east and you didn't see the game until 3 hours after it was played?

I wouldn't be surprised if that was done because of pressure from churches because they didn't want competition Sunday morning at 10am from football games on TV.

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by wayner

I wouldn't be surprised if that was done because of pressure from churches because they didn't want competition Sunday morning at 10am from football games on TV.

Quick googling suggests the NBA and NCAA were more likely to do this than the NFL, but just the thought that it ever happened is funny. The NBA link talks about how CBS instructed affiliate news casts to not report on the scores of the games. So funny to imagine a world where information was not so freely flowing from every direction that a broadcaster could instruct its channels not to report a score just so its tape delayed broadcasts weren't spoiled.

NBA until 1986 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_on_...off_scheduling

NFL (Monday Night Footbal) until 1996: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monday_...ball#Air_times

[Slugger]

Required override titles:

Olympic Hockey
Men's Olympic Hockey
Women's Olympic Hockey

Any of those will work for any of the games. Then you also need to override the episode name with the teams playing. I got a little lazy/way short on time for this and so there is one caveat to this monitor: it assumes that on any given day, two nations will not play each other in both men's and women's action. The only scoreboard I could find that was usable was on espn.com and in their infinite wisdom, they decided to put both scores on a single page. I just didn't have time to chop and split the page up so it's all one monitor. As long as the same two nations don't play in both tournaments on the same day then the monitor will work fine; if that assumption doesn't hold then things will get wonky (on those days only). Because both tournaments are running on the same monitor, you could use the "Men's Olympic Hockey" title override and use a women's game as the subtitle and it will monitor the women's game regardless of the title so keep that in mind.

There were no other requests for monitors, which is good b/c I really didn't have time as it turns out so these are the only monitors I plan on doing for these Olympics. This monitor is now live on the livepvrdata web site.

[wayner]

Now that we are in the midst of Hockey are they being monitored by SRE? The actual show titles from CBC is actually something like "XXII Winter Olympics" so I guess I would have to change the show title. Canada is actually playing right now but the "Show" on CBC of Olympics runs from 10am-3pm and the Canada - NOrway games starts at 12 so it should easily be over by the time the coverage stops at 3pm.

[Slugger]

Yes, they are being monitored. See the post directly above yours.

So yeah, you don't need to monitor most games as the CBC's block coverage encompasses the entire game and then some. But I just want the hockey game recorded so what I've been doing is scheduling the recording, telling Sage to start the recording late (so it doesn't start until the hockey game starts) and then overriding the title and team info with SRE so SRE monitors the game. Make sure your SRE settings are set to allow it to end recordings early. With that setting enabled, SRE will kill the recording once the hockey game is over. This also covers you in case the game actually extends beyond the EPG times. You will need to override the details with SRE in order for it to monitor any hockey games. This is intentional, mostly not to interfere with recordings done by Americans stuck with NBC's "not so live" Olympic coverage.

Edit: I'm working and recording the hockey game so no spoilers allowed (which should be the general rule on a pvr software site anyways )

[cat6man]

It's that time of year again, and SRE is automatically picking up all my baseball games perfectly.

Thanks once again to Slugger for the best app ever.

[zoundz]

This looks to be the most recent SRE thread, so here goes.

I'm having a problem with SRE recently. When SRE is monitoring a favorite and changes the status from favorite to manual recording (it appears to be about 2 minutes before the favorite was scheduled to end, but the problem occurs whenever the status is changed), a new recording file (....1.mpg) is created. When this happens, it appears that SageTV decides that the first file (...0.mpg) is a partial recording of a favorite and deletes the file. It seems to me, but I'm not sure, that this started to happen recently and did not occur in the past. All anecdotal and dependent on my aging an fuzzy memory banks. I realize that I can tell SageTV not to delete partial recordings, but I never had to do that before and I would rather not. I guess the question is whether the new file creation is the result of a recent change to SRE or if it was always that way and I never noticed. This has been happening to me when I am watching the monitored recording while it's recording. I don't know if it happens when it's not being watched at the same time. If I change the favorite to a manual recording before it starts, the problem does not occur. If I change it to a manual recording at some arbitrary point, the problem occurs at that point. Basically, once the status changes from favorite to manual, SageTV deletes the file for the first part of the show, even if it is being watched at the time. The first time this happened, my extender just quit and I was scratching my head until I realized that the file that the extender was playing was deleted out from under it. Not the end of the world, but SRE is such a totally cool plugin, I'd like to see it work even better. In the meantime, I just change the favorite to a manual record before it starts, but that requires that I actually be paying attention - senior moments not permitted.

TIA for any help on this...

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by zoundz

This looks to be the most recent SRE thread, so here goes.

I'm having a problem with SRE recently. When SRE is monitoring a favorite and changes the status from favorite to manual recording (it appears to be about 2 minutes before the favorite was scheduled to end, but the problem occurs whenever the status is changed), a new recording file (....1.mpg) is created. When this happens, it appears that SageTV decides that the first file (...0.mpg) is a partial recording of a favorite and deletes the file. It seems to me, but I'm not sure, that this started to happen recently and did not occur in the past. All anecdotal and dependent on my aging an fuzzy memory banks. I realize that I can tell SageTV not to delete partial recordings, but I never had to do that before and I would rather not. I guess the question is whether the new file creation is the result of a recent change to SRE or if it was always that way and I never noticed. This has been happening to me when I am watching the monitored recording while it's recording. I don't know if it happens when it's not being watched at the same time. If I change the favorite to a manual recording before it starts, the problem does not occur. If I change it to a manual recording at some arbitrary point, the problem occurs at that point. Basically, once the status changes from favorite to manual, SageTV deletes the file for the first part of the show, even if it is being watched at the time. The first time this happened, my extender just quit and I was scratching my head until I realized that the file that the extender was playing was deleted out from under it. Not the end of the world, but SRE is such a totally cool plugin, I'd like to see it work even better. In the meantime, I just change the favorite to a manual record before it starts, but that requires that I actually be paying attention - senior moments not permitted.

TIA for any help on this...

Hmm... well the last time the code was changed was July 2012, so there is no recent change to explain the sudden behaviour.

Let's start with the SRE log file: SageTV\plugins\sre4\sre.log

Attach that file, hopefully that gives us a hint as to what's going on.

What has me confused is that you say the recording gets deleted while it's recording. This certainly isn't SRE, SRE never deletes anything and even if it did it would do it via a Sage API call and that wouldn't allow an active recording to delete (I don't think). SRE does change the recording to a manual recording once it starts to modify the end time of the recording. That shouldn't cause the first part of the recording to immediately delete. I've never seen that happen and I use the plugin most every night in all ways (time shifted live viewing, record and watch it after it's done recording, etc.). All my games are recorded as favs and the status changes. I suspect we'll need to inspect the sagetv_0.txt debug log as well to get an understanding as to why the original recording is being deleted because I know for a fact it isn't SRE that's deleting it, but SRE's modification of the recording to a manual recording seems like it's definitely causing something else to delete the recording.

One thing to try immediately: disable the 'Remove Manual Flag for Favourites' option in the SRE settings. I don't know if this is related or not, but I do know I had to disable this setting for some reason awhile ago and I don't remember why. I don't have a bug logged for the reason nor do I have anything in my notebook so the reason is long since forgotten and there is no plan to investigate it any further or to release a new version of this plugin (it was EOL'd back in 2012).

However, provide your logs and if it happens to be a killer bug with no workaorund then I might just fix it because I do still use this plugin daily.

[zoundz]

Thanks for getting back to me on this. I realize that SRE isn't actually doing the deletion of the file. The <remove manual flag> has been disabled all along since I wanted to be able to manually delete the files. I've done a bit more testing and it appears that the ...0.mpg file does not get deleted when the status is changed from favorite to manual. I used both the web server interface and the extender gui to change the status and the file was not deleted. That being said, when I tried to change the status back to favorite while it was still being recorded, the ...0.mpg file was deleted and the recording continued on the ...1.mpg file. The same behavior I'm seeing with SRE. Both of these tests were done while the show was being recorded but not watched. Neither test was using SRE. Just an ordinary favorite. I think that changing to the ...1.mpg file makes sense, since the only way to remove the manual status while it's recording is to cancel the recording and that stops it momentarily and it restarts as the favorite again. I don't know why SageTV is deleting the ...0.mpg file though. Since I wasn't watching the show at the time, the <delete live tv files> flag should not have been relevant, although it is set. I need to do some more tests to see if I can find any more clues. If you have any thoughts, I would appreciate it. I get the feeling that SageTV is confused about something, since this behavior suddenly appeared out of the blue.

It is a wondrous if sometimes inscrutable beast this SageTV...

[Slugger]

You'll need to look at the Sage debug log, it will tell you why it's deleting files.

[zoundz]

Originally Posted by Slugger

You'll need to look at the Sage debug log, it will tell you why it's deleting files.

Indeed.

OK, so following up on this...
I found this little tidbit in the log where I was changing recordings from favorite to manual and back to favorite:

Sage error log.txt

The last five lines show the problem...

Follow along in your books as we see what was going on:

My favorite default recording quality was <Default: MPEG2 Max Quality...> which apparently was fine as long as I had an analog encoder in SageTV. I recently deleted all 4 of my Hauppauge 2250 inputs because I had no analogs and no more clear QAM's available. This appears to be when the trouble started. All of my inputs are HDHomerun Prime/SageDCT now and it appears that SageTV was getting confused about what the record quality was. I changed the favorite default record quality to <MPEG2 Max Quality...> (no <Default:> ) and created a new favorite to test with. No problem. I changed the record quality on the favorite that was causing the problem (quality is set when the favorite is created even if you change the default later) and it was fine when I wasn't watching it while it recorded. Today it was fine while it was being watched, so I think that this actually was the problem.

Obviously a small glitch in SageTV that should be filed away in the knowledge base for possible future reference.

Thanks for the help....

[brianblank]

Will the 2014 FIFA World Cup be a monitored event? My scheduled recordings of the US games shows that the games are not monitored.

[Slugger]

I don't watch soccer so I didn't have a need for it. No one else spoke up until now. I can probably add one, it's not a priority and I'd only do it if the one web site I use for monitors is doing live World Cup scores because I can knock it out in 20 mins. If I have to use espn or some other site then it take a few hours and some frustration/experimentation, which I don't see myself doing considering I personally will be watching exactly zero minutes of this tournament.

I'll see what tomorrow morning brings.