Loosing Channels / Guide disappearing – IceTV and Vista (Possibly also MCE2005)

[impact]

Nial, usually when someone posts - it does not happen to me, it does within the week - so be careful......

Reordering channels has nothing to do with it unfortunately... Since prooved that the problem occurs if you do or do not re order your channels during setup. The rescanning is a problem, sometimes your lucky enough to just add the channels, other times you really do need to reset it all before it picks up the channels ( I find I can get 2 goes of it before it completely craps out and need to reset to get the channels).

Others running their own epg solution have also experienced the problem, so its not related to just icetv or free epg - the epg may or may not be related.... What is interesting though, is nobody has actually stated they have experienced the problem on 64bit... Now that may actually be a good lead ? However for some users it takes months and months before the problem is noticed - with a smaller 64 bit user base, maybe its just sitting dormant waiting... waiting.... waiting....

Removing the tree of the tuners registry would be a pain, for anyone running more than 2 tuners - having to go through the setup and hacks to get more than 2 tuners working again - ouch! Id just rescan the channels - it would be quicker and easier...

Yep the registry does muck up - noticed that, but the contents of the sdf files certainly muck up a lot more... So any monitoring / self repairing app would probably need to monitor and fix both !!!

Oh who knows.... welcome to the elite club niall !!!!

[Lester_Burnham]

Incidentally - my work machine running 64bit vista + single tuner (avermedia) uses my own reprocessed epg solution and has never experienced this problem

Hi,

Does this 64 bit machine run 24/7? Is it recording or running during the weekend? (normally things seem to stuff up from Fri-Sun)

Mine was in standby the last time it happened for others, about 2 weeks ago I think, waking only for guide updates and possibly backup and it was not effected. No programs were scheduled to run. So, the scan must run at a certain time each day or week.

Can we pin point the service that does this back ground scanning? Is it the same one the we use manually. How could it do it if we are watching TV? Does it create a secondary channel list and update later? How do we track this down?

Lester

[impact]

Do you want the good news or the bad news ? Lol - its all bad really / but its all good !!!

My guide mucked up between 9am and 10am this morning - horah !! 4 Gb of logfiles / pictures / directory dumps have been sent to microsoft this morning... So for the first time they have much more detail of what is going on behind the scenes with snapshots before and after...

Now I have not had a good chance to go through the info myself - but what I have noticed is interesting.....

It appears - well its not my logfile / code - so these are all just educated guesses....

The background dvb-t scan occurs several times a day - in fact during the weekend when no problems occured, it was doing this background thingo every hour constantly...
During the past week, the background scan appears to have not found anything that was different.... over the weekend however it was timing out and could not get any information. Interestingly during the weekend I had a big download going on my adsl to another machine - any machine wanting to go to the outside world would have had problems.... A very similar situation I believe to what would occur if the main MCE box had no internet connectivity... Why ? Does the code share the tcp/ip stack or something for lookup to access internal dvb-t cards or something silly? Could not find its own internal address and times out ? Who knows....

However this morning - my network congestion cleared and BOOM - Lost my good setup.

Now - what does the logfile show that is different to the scan this morning.....

It does not appear to be related to frequency or quality of service - as good and bad scans show;
Found matching frequency within fine tune tolerance, actual = 177500KHz, locator = 177500KHz

But it does try to go and Add Services to the EPG !!!!! And it does seem to go on with differing internal numbers than previously....

Why would it need to add services - what is different ? I already have all the Seven Services... Hmmmm....

Oh well - lets see what kind of responses I get this week.... One step forward.

[Neilwa]

I can confirm that my guide data lost SBS late yesterday, then I was unable to get it back until Monday morning which made me think it was an IceTV server issue due to the error 24 message when attempting to get guide data- I reported it in the IceTV threads -copy below:

SBS went missing from the guide yesterday (Sunday night 15/4/07) around 10pm. Tried downloading the guide manually and got an error 24 message. Reassigning channels didn't work. Tried downloading manually from the PIMP and was unable to. PIMP was showing a separate running program icon in the system tray every time I attempted to download manually!! Ended up with 5 PIMP icons and the program splash coming up on the screen every few seconds. I then tried to uninstall and reinstall PIMP. Still got error 24 when trying to download the guide manually.

By Monday morning the guide data was able to be downloaded manually. This suggests the IceTV server was not responding for some reason late Sunday night. Next time I get an error 24 I will wait 12 hours to see if it is a server problem.

Had to reassign all channels again and re-set all scheduled recordings gggggggggrrrrrrrr except for - strangely - SBS. All the scheduled recordings were preserved for SBS!! Maybe this can indicate a pattern of behaviour for the people trying to fix the bugs???

EDIT - Impact advised me IceTV did have a problem Sunday night. Unfortunately, when I checked their server status Sunday night it showed everything was OK. This brings up an issue regarding what their website server status alert actually refers to and whether it is reliable. I also could not access their forums at the time and I did persist for a couple of hours!

[Lester_Burnham]

Hi,

There's one last thing I'd love to try and prove? Are channel 7 (7 SD) & SBS actually transmitting anything different at the times of the much up, or is it a Vista screw up.

I'm starting to think it's Vista myself.

Lester

[amilwain]

I'm sure that this has already been suggested but can't Microsoft and IceTV get together and provide the Ice Guide totally natively in MCE/Vista.

My idea is that we still pay ICE for an account as ICE provide the data MS wear no copyright/legal risk but we have the full native MS guide.

At least this way MS will support the guide locally (even if they aren't providing the data) and that way they have to fix problems like this, they wont be able to say we dont support the guide in Australia.

Anthony

[DeadlyChicken]

ok just so you know, Ice do not cover all of Austrlaia. So as its not a solution for all in all probability its not going to be native. Secondly if you do not like the way Ice guide works, you can still get its data via Free EPG in what to all intents and purposes is the exact way the guide works natively ( I used to live in the UK where the guide was wonderful ;P ) except instead of getting the data from a microsoft internet address, its pulls it from Free EPG's in the same way.

I doubt MS really care about media center in Aus. Although with Vista they might start to a bit, they sold a heap of MCE 2005 OS as the new windows, theres heaps of folk out there with it on laptops with no idea that it does anything different to XP other than have funky screensavers and the Microsoft Dancers. the lack of EPG didn't really effect their sales, and with Digital TV in the state its in in Aus. they probably wont care for a few years. But at least they will be able to see ho wmany people actually wanted media center over here and when they realise the small nubmers they might try and rectify it ?

I love the media center concept, but the more I use it ( 4 years now ? ) the more I realise its just not ready for joe public.

[ReP0]

Originally Posted by DeadlyChicken

I love the media center concept, but the more I use it ( 4 years now ? ) the more I realise its just not ready for joe public.

Really? whats missing beside the guide. If Vista was as stable as XP MCE there wouldn't be any issues whatsoever.

For the record I'm against paying for an EPG, ice-tv or anyone like it will never get my business. Instead we should be pressuring our politicians to ammend and demand the episode guides be published free of charge as part of the operating license. Descriptions are optional but the program name and time should all be there for free. Given the information is available in your weekly paper (local) which I get for free I don't see the problem.

Saying this is doesn't worry me. I'm starting to watch less and less of aussie tv and other parts of my media centre are becoming more important. TV broadcasters will soon learn that if they make it hard for people to tune into the programs they wish to watch people will just drop them completely for easier methods.

[philzgr8]

Originally Posted by DeadlyChicken

I love the media center concept, but the more I use it ( 4 years now ? ) the more I realise its just not ready for joe public.

ROFL... You're probably right but then by the same token in truth neither is Windows itself!

[rrychter]

So. Has anyone got a decent fix for the losing of channels?

Thanks,
Robert

[Neilwa]

There is no decent fix. The more I think about it, the more I can't believe that MS would have released such a buggy system after such a long time in its development and the fact that it doesn't seem to do very much more compared to MCE2005 apart from cosmetics. It was supposed to support more than 2 tuners and from what I've heard from other technical people, that's some way off too.

I reckon the EPG problems might get sorted out around the time the courts rule on the Nine Network's legal action against IceTV for it using it's guide information for which Nine believes it has the total right to with-hold from anybody else on the basis it can not be reproduced anywhere other than places licensed/approved by Nine. This topic alone has caused much debate.

I don't believe IceTv are doing anything wrong as long as they can prove they source the data from a variety of places and reuse the information like any respected researcher would do without plagiarizing it. That is, expressing the information in an artistic and/or literary way other than simple imitation. They are certainly providing the information in a novel way - even their PIMP service is quite inventive. They seem to obtain it from a variety of sources once it becomes common knowledge and their program writeups make for interesting reading. Their presentation of the data within the MC interface is also excellent - where extra program recording settings can be utilised, such as excluding reruns/repeats from being recorded under series recordings.

[DeadlyChicken]

I may be way off the mark here, but does this have anything to do with using more than the native 2 tuners ? Only switched back to a single dual card recently so need longer to wait for this to happen again. But so far it seems more stable ?

just thought I would throw it out there.