Same Show Name, 2 Channels Bug

I think I’ve stumbled across a bug. Today, the show “2018 Wimbledon Championships, Round of 16” was playing on ESPN and ESPN 2. While the two shows have the same name, they were actually not the same. I recorded both of them. It appears that I’ve ended up with one file flipping between the two channels every half a second or so.

This ends up looking like a heavily corrupted file, but I believe it’s two tuners trying to write to one file at the same time.

Admittedly, this is not a frequent occurrence where there are two different shows playing at exactly the same time with the same name on different channels, but this can potentially be an issue with some sporting events. For instance, this is actually going to be an issue again for Wimbledon on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.

Yuck that’s a nasty bug. What’s the exact file name of the recording?

The file name is “2018 Wimbledon Championships Round of 16 2018-07-09-0659.mpg”. For reference, I’m running things off a ReadyNAS 516.

I’m going to try a workaround tomorrow where I pad one of the recordings to 3 minutes early and the other to 1 minute early. I had both of them set to record 1 minute early and the shows started at exactly the same time, which I assume contributed to the exact same file name issue. I’m guessing this will create two different files.

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Yes padding will create separate files. That’s a good workaround. I will work on a proper fix in the meantime.

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@tmm1 this may be related to my issue yesterday, the same baseball game was on two channels (at least that is what the guide said) and one of the channels wouldn’t play at all. I tried again an hour later after the game had ended and both channels played fine.

This bug affects recordings that happen simultaneously, starting at the same time and with the same show/episode name. It doesn’t affect live tv.

Maybe a good opportunity to implement Channel Number (i.e. 21-3 or 736) and maybe callsign in the recorded filename, which I think was suggested earlier?

Wondering how suggestions for ChannelsDVR get implemented?

Do we have to vote for them, or put them in a specific section of your forum, or buy you a Starbucks, or …?

If it’s like Plex or SD, then it will never happen in the vacuum of the Space Occupied by paying customers…

This post was Not meant to be critical of Channels, just a question of how we paying customers can request improvements or changes to the apps. I love ChannelsDVR and just want to help improve it.

Setting the different start times worked as expected and I now have two separate recordings for today despite the duplicate show names.

Thanks for the help Aman and the super fast response!

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