Recorded State Overwritten when Pass is Paused

Channels DVR Server Troubleshooting
#1

Pausing a Pass overwrites the recorded state of queued episodes when those episodes have been previously recorded. This started happening recently, within the last couple of weeks. I'm currently running the latest pre-release DVR (v2024.02.29.0351) with advanced settings "Experimental Imported Movie Matching" and "EDL Export" both enabled.

I'm trying to re-record some episodes of a show ("Bones") that were recorded from a channel that distorts the video between consecutive episodes. For this example, I'll focus on Bones S01E06 (tmsId: EP007542010006). First, I open the upcoming airings page (/admin/search/185129?seriesName=Bones), find S01E06, open its dropdown menu, and click "Mark as not recorded." Next, I pause the Pass, and then resume the Pass, so that S01E06 is scheduled to record right away. Now the strange part: if I pause the Pass again, the DVR marks S01E06 as Recorded, referencing the existing (inferior) recording in /dvr/programs ("EP007542010006": "recorded-13773"). This means the DVR has essentially "forgotten" that I had marked S01E06 as not recorded, since it has been marked as recorded again (by the DVR), and now will not record S01E06 when I resume the Pass.

Logs have been submitted as 2b6e2331-834d-4fef-87c2-ea216d9c0755.

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#2

Yes, you are describing the current behavior of our implementation.

#3

How do you recommend I go about re-recording low-quality/interrupted episodes without having to delete the existing ones first?

It seems counterintuitive for "Mark as not recorded" to be so temporary, and makes it harder to "trust" the DVR scheduler.

I was under the impression that the "Experimental Imported Movie Matching" only affected Movies, is that not the case? Does it affect TV Show episodes too?

#5

My guess is that the "Experimental Imported Movie Matching" is affecting TV Show episodes since I have that disabled and don't see the behavior you reported.

Have you tried temporarily disabling the "Experimental Imported Movie Matching" to see if you can reproduce the behavior?

Sounds like with that Experimental setting enabled it's scanning all /files and making sure every one is represented in /programs. When you mark an episode as not recorded, it deletes the entry in /programs for that recorded/imported file.

#6

Why are you mucking with the pass. Simply mark the episode as not recorded, and then select it to manually record (without involving the pass at all).

#7

Because you find out when you do that, sometimes the schedule changes and it doesn't air, or airs at a different time. If you manually select it to record, the scheduler won't update it, you're basically saying record whatever airs on this channel at this day and time for this duration. Been there, done that.

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#8

As we were working on the experimental feature, we found that there were aspects of the existing tracking of recorded state that was not behaving in the way we had intended. Improvements were made to make it more in line with our initial intentions.

As part of these changes, we did update behavior such that we link up recordings in your library with the state that tracks if something has been recorded or not.

It looks like we're going to need to implement separate tracking of "things you want re-recorded" outside of the mechanisms we currently have. I'm not sure when we'll get to this, but thanks for raising this as an edge case.

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#9

What I would do for those recordings you want to re-record, but keep the current one until then, is setup another server just to re-record those. The only other way I can think of is to move the current recording outside of the Channels directory, delete it from within Channels and then mark it as not recorded.

Can anyone think of another work around?

#10

Other than opting to use a manual recording for the replacement, not really.

#11

How about deleting the entry to that recording from the DB ?

#12

Do you know of a way to do that besides this?

#13

Hitting "Mark as not recorded" is good enough as long as you don't pause and resume a pass that contains that recording.

This issue is specifically related to when you pause and resume a relevant pass.

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#14

So after marking it as not recorded, just wait for the next guide update to schedule it, right?
Or do a Fetch Guide Updates instead of Pause and Resume Pass.

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#15

Good idea. Unfortunately, the behavior persists when "Experimental Imported Movie Matching" is disabled.

#16

Beat me to it.
After marking episodes as not recorded, rather than pausing and resuming the Pass, running "Fetch Guide Updates" seems to work well to get the DVR scheduler to pick up those changes right away.

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#17

Worked here also.
Going to be hard changing that "muscle memory". I'm so used to pause/resume pass after marking as not recorded to bump the scheduler.

#18

This should prevent you from needing to do something after you mark it as wanting to be re-recorded.

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Unmark Program as Recorded