Timer refuses to be built all of a sudden

[tonymy01]

Ok, I am having this quirk again, in the past I didn't care much about it, as I was only mucking about setting a timer for a show I knew my 5K was recording fine (Red Dwarf), but for some reason the ICETV widget and Web is playing silly games for my "Scrapheap Challenge" timers all of a sudden.    Everything has been going fine for the past 3 or 4 weeks, and I noticed my Sunday ScrapHeap wasn't on the Beyonwiz HDD (was it on yesterday, I couldn't find it in the guide with a quick look?).   But there is no timers for this week either, but there are clearly eps on all week.   The widget is also not showing any red dots.    When I click the widget and choose "record series" for both first runs & repeats, a spinning status icon spins for a bit, then nothing (where as normally a red dot would show reasonably quickly).
So off to the webpage I go to try setting it there.
Looking at the entries, something is strange.   There is no red dot, there is the typical "favourite" icon (where as there is no fave icon for the widget for some reason??), and it doesn't give me series recording options for the show (it has a record option however):  see http://tonyspage.abock.de/beyonwiz/iceprobs1.PNG
If I choose the record option, it doesn't bring up any series recording options, but does immediately take me back to the guide with an open red dot.   But if I refresh the guide page (well, go to say, my shows, then back to the TV guide), the red dot is gone and there is no timers on the Beyonwiz to be found.
So why does ICE think a series recording is setup for Scrapheap, but then doesn't do anything about it?
Like I said, I have had this issue more than once in the past with other shows and it was a real pain to solve, I think I ended up having to cancel all series recording for that, cancel the favourite, WAIT (not waiting gave me some kind of other grief if I remember correctly, possibly due to the poor polling frequency allowed to the Beyonwiz to check the cancellation has updated) then setup the favourite and series recording all over again.

But if I wasn't checking, I wouldn't have noticed that ICE seems to have lost the plot here?    I could never get it to record Red Dwarf properly once ABC2 started putting it on the weekends also (and/or ICE started putting repeat tags on the Monday episode which isn't really a repeat on ABC2), and never bothered to persue too much as PerlTGD does a fine job on the 5K for this.

Regards
Tony

[Marc]

Thanks for the bug report.

We'll look into it. If we require more info we'll be in touch.

[bruiser333]

FWIW, this is not an isolated issue; users have been posting about this issue for a while now. Not sure if it is a BW related problem, but it's a pain when it occurs. I've managed to 'fix' a couple of situations by clicking on the Record button for some of my Series recordings that are stuck in limbo, but not always.

[Marc]

We're certainly investigating things from our server side and from the PVR side. Please send any more info you have on failed recordings via the support contact page.

[tonymy01]

Bugger bugger bugger.   I found the screen where I could list my timer types (in "my shows"), and found I had them as first runs, but this week has rpt flags, so mystery solved.   It is a shame that both the Widget and Guide webpage don't give you any kind of failure reason or whatever when you try to schedule the recording however (or retry getting it created!).   And it doesn't want to honour the "record" option anyway (although it would be nice when "record" is pressed in the guide view that it provides all the options for changing recording prefs as per the "my shows" screen, this would have highlighted the issue of repeat vs 1st run).
(This was also why Red Dwarf didn't have the timers created, but ABC2 is still showing "new" episodes of Red Dwarf on Monday nights, and "repeats" on the weekend... but I think I had problems trying to convince ICE to create timers for them just on Monday for repeats and first runs when it already had a series setup).
Cheers

[prl]

...
It is a shame that both the Widget and Guide webpage don't give you any kind of failure reason or whatever when you try to schedule the recording however (or retry getting it created!).
...

I agree. I found the lack of error messages, and the low level of useful information in them when they were there, a difficulty when I was having problems with timers, too. See here and here.

The interface keeping quiet when everything is going well, is good. Stony silence when it's not, is not good.