ExternalDisplay - Beta Testers Wanted

[OscarL]

Did some more testing.
I could see that after watching a channel without EPG the program information in the Property Browser was updated correctly (that is, it showed correct channel, program name etc) But the status was Idle insted of Watching TV. This was even when watching a channel with EPG if I previously had watched channel without EPG.
After a restart of PVRX2 it works again.

[pBS]

i can't get advanced button to pop up right, usually it just pops up debug form instead...i never see the advanced button panel.....

looks very promising...glad there are alt drivers...and xml editability..

EDIT: my bad...looks like some output drivers don't have advanced options..
[was using clipboard drv]

[ralphy]

OscarL, iwan and dslowik -

thank you all for your help in testing. The good news is that I have been able to reproduce the lockup problem. The bad news is that I haven't found the quick solution. Please bear with me, and thank you for your patience.

Watch this space!

[iwan]

OscarL, iwan and dslowik -

thank you all for your help in testing. The good news is that I have been able to reproduce the lockup problem. The bad news is that I haven't found the quick solution. Please bear with me, and thank you for your patience.

Watch this space!

ralphy, this is pretty good news. Will wait impatiently for more good news ...

[ralphy]

Edit ExternalDisplay.xml ( in the plugins folder).

You will find the following two entries with:
<Text Value=": #736">

This should be replaced with
<Text Value="Not Available"> (or the equivalent message in the language of your choice!)


the entry
<Text Value=" (#112)">

should be replaced with

<Text Value="PAUSED">

The reason this lockup never occurred in my testing in December is because of the bug I 'fixed' to address a problem of the display showing the old data if the EPG did not have any information. When there is no EPG data, or if the SQL Select fails, I set the program details to "string.empty" (null). The xml then translated this to use a Text Value of #736. The original MediaPortal code supports multiple languages, and #736 gets translated to something depending on the language. Well I thought I disabled this part of the code, but looks like I didn't do this properly. And in any case, the xml file was wrong, since it shouldn't have included the #736 and #112 entries :o

The problem turned out to be easily fixed by fixing the xml, but I was barking up the wrong tree looking for all sorts of other problems.

But the SQL Select command still gives an error sometimes, even when there seems to be EPG data available - I'm working on that one still. In the meantime, there may be some channels that have valid EPG data, that throw an exception in the logs, but only display the channel and channel name in the display.

In the meantime, hopefully you will have a more reliable display of program information, without lockups.

I think this is one bug solved - what's the next one? :eek:

Once I get confirmation all seems ok, I'll post a new installer.

[iwan]

Edit ExternalDisplay.xml ( in the plugins folder).

You will find the following two entries with:
<Text Value=": #736">

This should be replaced with
<Text Value="Not Available"> (or the equivalent message in the language of your choice!)


the entry
<Text Value=" (#112)">

should be replaced with

<Text Value="PAUSED">

Did some quick testing: Seems to work perfectly good. Great work, ralphy !
Will test more thoroughly including heavy channel changing later on when the wife's recording is done

[OscarL]

Seems to work fine now. Thanks again

[iwan]

Edit ExternalDisplay.xml ( in the plugins folder).

You will find the following two entries with:
<Text Value=": #736">

This should be replaced with
<Text Value="Not Available"> (or the equivalent message in the language of your choice!)

Did some more testing - your plugin works great.
I do see those 'Not Available' quite often, though. EPG-Data is there. Maybe you can find some more information in the logs.

[ralphy]

I believe I have found a solution to the SQL errors that have occassionally been occurring. (see this thread. Thanks Ommina for the pointers)

For those interested, the original lock up problems occurred for those channels that had EPG description fields longer than 255 characters. This caused a exception to be thrown, which caused the lockup until the changes were made to the XML files. It then just showed "Not available", because the database query was failing to retieve data when the description was too long.

As the other thread shows, the way I get around this is to use the SQLite objects, rather than the DBCommand and DataTable objects.

Here's a new patch.

[iwan]

I believe I have found a solution to the SQL errors that have occassionally been occurring.

Here's a new patch.

Great Work, ralphy!
Works almost perfectly - only one channel (NDR) gave me an error message like: 'Natural language not supported'. Sorry for not being more precise - forgot to write it down.
The problem doesn't seem to persist, as I got no error message 30 minutes later.
Anyway, logs attached.