Skip duplicates query

[prouton]

I'm not certain how "skip duplicates" works under the covers. When used in the States, getting guide data from Schedules Direct, is the show title/episode name used to determine duplicates, or does it rely upon the show id ("uid") supplied in the EPG data to be unique? (question #1)

I recently had some trouble (as did a friend and my father) with episodes of "Fast Money" (weekday news program on CNBC) not being scheduled via a long-standing recurring recording entry. The show name appeared to be the same (and the one-off scheduled recordings ended up in the usual folder). When I looked at the logs, it appeared that the daily (8:00am) EPG reload was canceling the recordings, unless I had gone into guide the previous evening and selected the one episode to be recorded.

So, is there a difference in how duplicates are handled when scheduling is done recurring versus one-off? (question #2)

[sub]

is the show title/episode name used to determine duplicates, or does it rely upon the show id ("uid") supplied in the EPG data to be unique? (question #1)

That latter.

So, is there a difference in how duplicates are handled when scheduling is done recurring versus one-off? (question #2)

The duplicate checking is only performed by the system when deciding whether to record a show as part of a season recording. It doesnt record it if another recording is sitting in the 'ready' or 'pending' list with the same unique show ideantifier.

Immediately after doing the automated nightly GB-PVR update, the system schedules any new season recordings, and gives pretty good log messages in GBPVRRecordingService.exe.log indicating which shows where scheduled, or skipped (and why), so post these logs if you're unsure and I'll take a look.

[fluffykeith]

Sorry to jump in here can I verify with you the operation of this.

In the program listing there is the unique_identifier (in my database these are empty strings).
If my XMLTV EPG could indicate that a pair of shows are the same then it would add some ID in this field, for example "showA".

show 1 - uniqueID = "showA"
show 2 - uniqueID = "showA"
show 3 - uniqueID = "showB"

So here if these shows are covered by the same recuring scheduled, then I would get pending entries for show 1 and show 3 but not show 2?

I'm asking because I could process the EPG (as some people I think are) to mark shows that I know are the same.

thanks for you help

Keith

[sub]

So here if these shows are covered by the same recuring scheduled, then I would get pending entries for show 1 and show 3 but not show 2?

Correct.

If you're doing it from xmltv, then you need to specify the unique ID in the zap2it format in the xml file.