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Subject says it all: tonight's episode of The Blacklist is flagged in the guide as a repeat, so my series recording for 'first run only' is not triggering.

It is actually the final episode in the current series (series 7, episode 19).

One other question then, is this only affecting the Simpsons episodes that are on Friday and Monday, with the episodes on Saturday and Sunday being correct?

I am not at home at the moment to check, but I know there is a recording of The Simpsons correctly scheduled on Sunday (that is not a repeat).  I am also sure that tonight's 6pm episode, and every 6pm episode next week (Mon-Wed) are scheduled to record.  I cannot recall if there was an episode scheduled tomorrow night.  I will check this evening.

OK, I've checked.  As of today's download, tonight's episode is now marked as a repeat and is no longer scheduled to record (if this is due to your efforts, thanks for looking into it!)  Ditto for tomorrow (Saturday).  But from Monday onwards the 6pm episodes are still not showing as repeats.

Still, for overlapping episodes, it will use two tuners.  Win7 is pretty dumb in that regard, unfortunately.

I am sorry to hear that -- I was hoping that this was something they might improve in Win7 over Vista.

For back-to-back episodes (eg 24 and Lost at the moment) I go in and change the hard padding for the series to 90 minutes, and then manually de-schedule the second episode.  The down side of this is that you lose the title and episode info for the second episode in the recorded file. 

I would really prefer that back-to-back first run episodes were listed as a single entry in the Ice EPG, for a variety of reasons (not least that the actual dividing point between two epsiodes is often nowhere near the 1-hour mark, so it's just better, IMHO, to have a single recorded file).  But when I suggested this in these forums previously I was shouted down by others who felt that the guide should not be formatted to suit people with "brain dead" PVRs.

I can see their point, but the option would be nice.

One other question then, is this only affecting the Simpsons episodes that are on Friday and Monday, with the episodes on Saturday and Sunday being correct?

I am not at home at the moment to check, but I know there is a recording of The Simpsons correctly scheduled on Sunday (that is not a repeat).  I am also sure that tonight's 6pm episode, and every 6pm episode next week (Mon-Wed) are scheduled to record.  I cannot recall if there was an episode scheduled tomorrow night.  I will check this evening.

I have had a look into this one and this comes down to how Vista and Windows 7 Media Center handle repeat information, even if a show is marked as a repeat unless it has an original air date listed then Media Center thinks they are not a repeat.

In the guide that was downloaded to your Media Center does it show an original air date for these shows?

Sorry, Daniel, that doesn't seem to be the problem.  "Thank God You're Here" has an original air date of 27/07/2008, The Simpson's on Friday is 13/01/2008, and so on...  They just don't seem to be marked as "repeat".

There are plenty of examples of repeats that are correctly flagged as such, eg the 6.00pm screening of The Simpsons today, and the 11.00pm screening of Family Guy.  However, there seem to be no repeat flags on any 6.00pm episodes of The Simpsons starting from tomorrow.

I am getting recordings scheduled for Thank Good You're Here tomorrow night, and The Simpsons at 6pm on Friday and Monday, even though they are repeats (and seem to be marked as repeats in the guide on the IceTV web site).

I have both set up as series recordings in Windows Vista MC (not via Interactive), and set to "first run only".  The downloaded EPG data (which I receive daily at around 5pm, and is up-to-date) seems to be missing the "repeat" flag.

Given some other recent postings regarding issues with repeats, I wonder if there is some problem with EPG data not being consistent with the Interactive guide on the web site?

Presumably comskip can be set up to be keyed off the 7TWO logo rather than the 7TWO PRIME one.

Yes -- normally it will "magically" find a watermark wherever it happens to be, but you can direct it to look only in the bottom right corner, for example.

The bigger issue may be whether the persistence of a solid logo through "black frames" interferes with the segmentation of the program in the first place.

I love watermarks!!! (So long as they are not too obtrusive.)

I find that, ironically, the watermark is the best indication on Australian commercial networks as to whether a segment is "program" or "commercial".  Without them, comskip (see www.comskip.org) is far less consistent or reliable in removing commercials!

8)

We got two episodes of Ugly Betty recorded last Tuesday.  Are you saying there was a third (in which case we missed it also), or that you didn't get the second?

I'm pretty sure that the double episode was in the guide for a few days beforehand, because I had to do some juggling to resolve a conflict with Big Love on SBS. 

You may think of them as "big ticket" items, but the fact is that a number of shows that started out on Seven with big audiences (Ugly Betty, Lost, Heroes, 24) have not rated well for some time now.  We should be thankful for the second digital channels.  Odds are that if it were not for 7TWO we would not be seeing these shows on free-to-air Australian TV at all (let alone in HD!)  Instead, we would be subjected to an inescapable barrage of celebrities and non-celebrities travelling, singing, dancing, cooking, and being interrogated by customs officers, interspersed with "CSI: Nantucket". "Law and Order: Copyright Infringement Squad" and Packed-to-the-bloody-Rafters...

In my opinion this is really not good enough.  I had to move my series recordings back to MCE because Intereactive's padding is "MCE default" at best, and MCE is "where possible" not hard padding which is NFG.  Interactive has no hard padding despite an insistive IceTV support saying it all works (rubbish).  So in short I've had to move my series back to the MCE.

I came to this same conclusion very early in my subscription to IceTV (I am still on Vista Media Center, and have no intention of moving to Windows 7 just yet!)  After some early experiments, I disabled Interactive and have never turned it back on.

Despite many apparent gripes about MCE (some no doubt motivated purely by general anti-MS sentiment), it's got some pretty smart features for series recording, if you use them appropriately.  For example, all series recordings have an associated priority to resolve conflicts, and MCE recognises duplicate screenings of a program (assuming the EPG data is correct) and will automatically record a duplicate if it has not recorded the initial screening due to a conflict.  Between priority settings and hard padding, it is possible to get MCE to schedule recordings in a totally predictable manner.

Soft padding, as you have noted, is essentially useless, but this is not the fault of MS or IceTV, it is because Australian commercial TV broadcasts never stay within their scheduled timeslots!  You are therefore quite likely to lose up to 10 minutes of the end of a program where it is not possible to apply the soft padding, and you would probably rather be informed of a conflict and given the opportunity to resolve it.

The only significant limitation of MCE (in Vista at least -- I'd be interested to know if this is improved in Windows 7) is its inability to recognise that two overlapping recordings on the same channel is not a true "conflict", because it could create both recording files using the same tuner.  Since it insists on scheduling both recordings on different tuners, unnecessary conflicts arise.  I know that there is other software that does not have this limitation, but the deciding factor for me is MCE's ability to work in the lounge room using my Xbox360 as an extender.

If IceTV Interactive could provide true synchronisation of MCE series recordings, including priority settings and hard post-padding, then it would be useful.  It also really needs to allow setting of hard padding on one-off recordings as well.

I appreciate that this would require a signficant MCE-specific development effort, and am therefore pleased to hear that the number of MCE subscribers is reaching a level where it is under discussion!

My Vista Media Center did not schedule Top Gear to record tonight, because it believes that a previous showing has already been recorded.  Series recording was set up in MCE, I do not use Interactive.

This seems to be a problem with the guide data.  Last time it happened for me was with the recent series of Red Dwarf, for which first episode recorded but the subsequent episodes were assumed to be duplicate showings.   I think this happens when episodes are given identical titles, but there could be some other metadata that MCE uses.

This is not a bug or "misfeature" in MCE, it is completely intentional, and quite useful.  Some of the new digital channels are scheduling new episodes of series in multiple timeslots (as is common on pay TV, and also on ABC1/2).  This feature avoids multiple recordings of the same show, and allows MCE to schedule around conflicts when alternative showings of a program are available.

Is anybody else seeing this happening?  I would be interested to know how common it is (i.e. how trustworthy is the EPG data).

Mark

Just noticed this last night (after ep 3 went to air).  Looks like episode 1 recorded two weeks ago, and then MCE decided that it did not need to record eps 2 & 3 because a previous showing had already been recorded.  Series recording was set up in MCE, not via Interactive.

This seems to be a problem with the guide data -- perhaps a failure to provide distinct episode titles, or whatever it is that MCE uses to distinguish between repeat screenings and new episodes?  Too late now for this series, but when I'm paying for an EPG it does not seem unreasonable to expect that these kinds of things will be done right.

It could be worse -- at least it's on iView.

With Ten's late messing with its schedule, it seemed weird that they would drop the new episodes of Futurama on Monday, but keep the repeats going on Wednesday.

In fact, I noticed last night that the synopsis in Ten's broadcast EPG for Futurama on Wednesday seems to suggest that it is part 3 of "Bender's Game" (i.e. the new episode, and not a repeat), with Bender in the asylum for a "robotomy".  I haven't found any corroborating evidence (all the print guides for the week show the old schedule).  Something for IceTV to keep an eye on, please??

For my own part, I have reset my series recording to include repeats as well as first run, just in case...

Running IceTV Interactive client 2.0.0.20 on Windows Vista in Melbourne.

I have Interactive set up to download new guide data at 6pm each day, but it seems to be happening consistently at about 5.15pm (ie an hour earlier than I would have expected).  PC clock is correct, and recordings all occur on time.

Not a big deal really, since I am getting a daily update, but wondering if this is a bug, or if I am misunderstanding something about the way the software is supposed to work.

Mark