XRecord and duplicates

[spyder40]

KingArgyle,

I figured it out, it's video archive doing the deleting. It appears it's database is more up to date than the rectracker database which is why they're getting whacked. How does the records in rectracker get mapped to the actual files on disk? I'm thinking I can do some sort of merge to get both databases in sync. Thanks for your help!

[KingArgyle]

KingArgyle,

I figured it out, it's video archive doing the deleting. It appears it's database is more up to date than the rectracker database which is why they're getting whacked. How does the records in rectracker get mapped to the actual files on disk? I'm thinking I can do some sort of merge to get both databases in sync. Thanks for your help!

Glad to hear you figured it out. I'm not sure how Video Archive is doing it's thing, but RecTracker doesn't track with the videos that are on the disk. The information for rectracker is added when the program is processed in the PostProcessing.bat file. It finds the show that was just recorded, and adds the information to the RecTracker database that is in the episode guide.

The information in RecTracker stays there even if the video is deleted. The only way it is removed is if you run the rectracker command line to remove it, or delete the entry from the Watched list in XRecord.

Since Video Archive is causing the problems, I'd start a new thread and ask Jeff to see if he can help fix the issue.

[spyder40]

A few more questions if you don't mind, trying to get a handle on how all this works. Rectracker runs in postprocessing, grabs the info on the recorded show, and adds it to the rectracker database. This is the database that XRecord/CDK use to look up for duplicates when the don't record duplicates is set, correct? Where does XRecord get all the info on the shows in ready? It has 209 episodes with descriptions but the rectracker database only has 60 some entries. Maybe I should post in the wishlist for a program/process flow and ERD's for GBPVR/plugins

[KingArgyle]

Programs that are in Ready Status get their information from the GBPVR Episode Guide as those shows are stored in the gbpvr database. I believe this is true even for when XRecord moves a show to a new folder, it just changes the location that GBPVR uses to identify the show so that it doesn't delete the entry from it's database.

The RecTracker database is only for shows that have been recorded, and it only adds the records if they aren't already in the database, so shows that have the same title and description don't get multiple entries added.

[spyder40]

So...if I do a compare of the records in both databases, can I manually update the rectracker database to get them in sync? I also have a few episodes with no description that I need to update also. I'm trying to understand if there are any other dependencies that I will screw if I do it. I'll give it a whirl after I backup everything up.

[KingArgyle]

I did a quick search on Video Archive and how it handles duplicates, and my recommendation right now is to do the following if you are going to use CDK Scheduler and XRecord for your scheduling.

1. Turn off the duplicate checking that Video Archive provides in it's configuration file. This will keep Video Archive from checking duplicates and deleting your pending programs out. Video Archive relies on the Zap2It UniqueID to be truely unique for each program. If for some reason, a show does not have a unique id then it will delete them from the pending list. CDK Scheduler on the other hand does not try to delete programs based off of the uniqueid, it just won't schedule them if they are the same. Slightly different but trying to accomplish the same thing.

2. If you feel that Video Archive is more accurate than the information in the RecTracker Database, I would suggest getting a record dump of the information in the Video Archive database, and then loading that information into the RecTracker database. All that is needed is Show Name, Sub Title, Description, and Zap2It Uniqueid if you have it.

Advtanages to RecTracker is that it will work even with a XMLTV data source that doesn't have uniqueid's. For these sources it checks Show, Sub Title, and Description to see if it has already recorded the episode or already scheduled the episode.

Hope that helps, but the biggest help is going to be turning of VA's duplicate checking.

[Jeff]

I did a quick search on Video Archive and how it handles duplicates, and my recommendation right now is to do the following if you are going to use CDK Scheduler and XRecord for your scheduling.

1. Turn off the duplicate checking that Video Archive provides in it's configuration file. This will keep Video Archive from checking duplicates and deleting your pending programs out. Video Archive relies on the Zap2It UniqueID to be truely unique for each program. If for some reason, a show does not have a unique id then it will delete them from the pending list. CDK Scheduler on the other hand does not try to delete programs based off of the uniqueid, it just won't schedule them if they are the same. Slightly different but trying to accomplish the same thing.

The video archive plug-in adds shows to its database as it finds them on the disk. When it finds a recording file (or sees on being created), it pulls the info from the GBPVR DB into its own DB.

The video archiver will only delete the recording if it finds that you have recording an exact match with the same unique ID. If a show does not have a truely unique ID, it is usually indicated by the unique ID ending in 4 zeros. if you set the "Allow duplicate recordings ending in" option to 0000 on the prune duplicates config settings tab then it will allow duplicates of these "unique" shows that do not have unique IDs. You can also specify individual show names that are allowed to have duplicates.

Also, the video archiver checks the list of pending recordings every 15 minutes to see if duplicates need to be pruned. it does this so that if you manually schedule a program or season recording that contains duplicates, the dups will be pruned typically before they have a chance to be recorded.

Jeff

Jeff

[KingArgyle]

Also, the video archiver checks the list of pending recordings every 15 minutes to see if duplicates need to be pruned. it does this so that if you manually schedule a program or season recording that contains duplicates, the dups will be pruned typically before they have a chance to be recorded.

Jeff, that would explain the reason why about 12 - 15 minutes later all the Three Stooges recordings that he had scheduled disapeared, especially if they all had the exact same uniqueId. VA thought they were duplicates and deleted them. I think overall, it's best to use either RecTracker or VA for duplicate checking, but not both together. There is too much manual intervention between the two and you could loose shows that you want to keep. It'll all depend on what the individual user's needs are, as you stated in your VA release thread.

[spyder40]

KingArgyle/Jeff,

Thanks for the info and that answers most of my questions. Jeff, can video archive read the .dat text files that get created with the recordings to add info to the database? Rectracker definately is short entries for some unknown reason. Maybe I had a problem with rectracker not running after a recording so the entries didn't get created (not sure when I added it to postprocessing but from the db it has to be quite a while ago). Through the course of time playing around with the software who knows what I could have done to mess it up. I'm going to try and put something together that checks for discrepancies between the two so I can get them back in sync.

[spyder40]

KingArgyle,

Ok, another question/wishlist item while figuring out what to do for my current situation. From what I'm gathering, rectracker does not pay attention to what's actually on disk, only what's been addded through postprocessing. If something gets deleted, it's still in the database and the duplicate checking will still work since it was probably watched and shouldn't be re-recorded. However, if something gets deleted by accident or a disk fails there is no way to get it recorded again without editing the database. It would be nice if there was a utility that could look at what has been recorded and what is actually on disk so that the records can be manipulated. I'm not sure if the video archive db or a db in gbpvr should be checked as well as the .dat text files on disk. Unfortunately I gave up programming 15 years ago and went into operationally running data centers/system admin work, designing/building/maintaining data/voice networks, and security. I can cobble something together to get my situation resolved but not something that I can publish to the community. You guys rock creating these plugins for this awesome software and it's times like this that makes me wish I would have stayed closer to the application programming side.