Comskip and corrupt wiz.bin

[btrcp2000]

Starting a new thread as I think I found the root of my issue, need guidance on next steps.

Comskip quit months ago, just found time to look into it. For giggles I renamed the wiz.bin and bak files and restarted the docker. CD/comskip fired right up perfectly.

I've never really understood what all is in it, but it seems to have found all my recordings. What do I lose if I just let it work off the new one? Watch history? Can I somehow fix the old one?

[Tiki]

Wiz.bin stores the settings for all your Favorites and it maintains your Watched history. It also stores EPG data (but this gets updated all the time any way). It also stores metadata for your recordings (but as you found out, this info is now stored multiple ways, so most of it gets recreated automatically if you delete wiz.bin). Some plugins may store additional information in wiz.bin too.

A while back someone published a tool on this forum somewhere that could read a wiz.bin file and export most of the contents to some sort of sql database format. I don’t know if anyone ever published a tool to do the reverse. There are no repair tools for wiz.bin though.

[wnjj]

Originally Posted by Tiki

Wiz.bin stores the settings for all your Favorites and it maintains your Watched history. It also stores EPG data (but this gets updated all the time any way). It also stores metadata for your recordings (but as you found out, this info is now stored multiple ways, so most of it gets recreated automatically if you delete wiz.bin). Some plugins may store additional information in wiz.bin too.

A while back someone published a tool on this forum somewhere that could read a wiz.bin file and export most of the contents to some sort of sql database format. I don’t know if anyone ever published a tool to do the reverse. There are no repair tools for wiz.bin though.

That was me. https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/sho...d.php?p=577768

That tool may help determine where the corruption is or may choke on it too. I figured I’d modify the code as needed to manually repair my wiz.bin if I ever needed to.

[btrcp2000]

Thanks, but that is well beyond my abilities to decipher. All I really need is favorites, which I am hoping to export from the webUI if I can ever get that working.

[btrcp2000]

Originally Posted by wnjj

That was me. https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/sho...d.php?p=577768

That tool may help determine where the corruption is or may choke on it too. I figured I’d modify the code as needed to manually repair my wiz.bin if I ever needed to.

Out of stubbornness I read your thread and although it is way over my head, I was able to figure out to run it by dragging the wiz.bin onto to the .exe in windows. Is it creating an output somewhere? where does the text file land?

thanks

[wnjj]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

Out of stubbornness I read your thread and although it is way over my head, I was able to figure out to run it by dragging the wiz.bin onto to the .exe in windows. Is it creating an output somewhere? where does the text file land?

thanks

Dragging onto the .exe just ran it without the proper syntax so probably didn't do anything. You need to open a command prompt by running 'cmd' from the start|run menu (or Windows key + R).

Then 'cd' into the location where the .exe (copy the wiz.bin there too) and run the following:

wiz2sql.exe wiz.bin -schema schema.sql -data data.sql

The data.sql file created will be a large text file with all of your 'stuff' in it, or at least as much as can be found before any corruption.

[mvkerr]

I know this is old post, but my system crashed and I also am interested in recovering the Favorites list from the Wiz.bin. I used your post to extract the Wiz.bin file into the SQL files, created the Wiz.db, and then loaded that into SQLiteStudio to view the data.

Where do I decipher how the Favorites are stored? I don't see a table listed as Favorites.

Thanks.

[wnjj]

I think favorites are "agents" of type "love" but I'll have to look when I get back to a PC.

[mvkerr]

Thanks. That showed me where to look closer. I checked the agents columns again and found "favProps" on the last column. I did not have my window wide enough to see it before. Most of the tables were very short width in SQLiteStudio.

I found a unique input as "UserCategory" for this column that appears to line up with the Favorites that I had. If I used a "Keyword" for a favorite name it appears in the "keyword" column like "TITLE:GOLF". But, all the ones that were entered by the Show Title can't be deciphered here.

I grep'd the data.sql file for "UserCategory" and am now creating a list to grep for the numbers in the "title" column of the agent table to find the rest of the names.

Thanks for you help. Could not have found the info with out your posts and supplied program. My data.sql file is 500MB, so it has been a while since I had a crash and lost everything without my backups being saved. My backup cron job died last summer and I did not notice, so no current backups.

[wnjj]

Yes, favorites are agents with agentmask bit 0 set.

Here's the code in Wizard.java that gets favorites. LOVE_MASK = 0x0001.

  public Agent[] getFavorites()
  {
    if (loading) return new Agent[0];

    Index indy = getIndex(AGENT_CODE, AGENTS_BY_CARNY_CODE);
    ArrayList<Agent> rv = new ArrayList<Agent>();
    try {
      indy.table.acquireReadLock();
      for (int i = 0; i < indy.table.num; i++)
        if ((((Agent) indy.data[i]).agentMask & Agent.LOVE_MASK) != 0)
          rv.add((Agent)indy.data[i]);
    } finally {
      indy.table.releaseReadLock();
    }
    return rv.toArray(new Agent[0]);
  }

Look inside Agent.java for all of the bits in the agentmask (i.e. firstruns, by actor, etc).

[mvkerr]

My posts are moderated so delayed to appear.

My grep method worked and I was able to get all my Favorites back. The BMT tools allowed me to get my 400+ unwatched recordings imported back into the correct locations. I am not a programmer at all, so your JAVA answer was over my head. My last programming was PERL scripts in the late 80's.

Thanks again. The crash got me moved to 64-bit SAGETV, so my speed is greatly improved with the increased JAVA heap size (and smaller Wiz.bin - 500M --> 40M). I was constantly crashing when it went into Slideshow sleep mode.