Strange timer recording behaviour when service scan fails

[prl]

I've put this in the Beyonwiz section because I've only observed it on Beyonwiz, but it may be a more generic problem with the "new" IceTV protocol.

In my Beyonwiz test setup, I have no access to a proper antenna connection, so fairly often when I do a service scan, the scan fails on some transponders/frequencies. When the scan completes, the service scan information is sent back to IceTV. The scan information sent back doesn't include all the services that are available for the region, so IceTV disables the missing services in the My Account>Guide Settings list, and that applies to all my IceTV devices, not just the one that had the scan problem. Given the fact that there's a single services list for all devices, while this is inconvenient, it's probably not a bug.

However, when this happens, any timers for series recordings are now failed on the IceTV side with the error "No valid service mapping for channel_id xx". This is also inconvenient, but not really a bug.

The bug is that when that happens, the IceTV code that tries to find an alternative time to record the same program is brought into action, and alternative timers are set, where possible, for the failed timers, even though the alternative recordings are on the same service that had generated the "No valid service mapping" in the first place.

This creates a mess where recordings aren't made at their usual times, and the only way I've been able to recover back to the timers being for their normal times is to delete and then re-create all the affected series recordings.

If a recording fails because of a "No valid service mapping" error, the IceTV scheduler should not try to create an alternative timer on the same service, or on any other service that has no valid service mapping.

[Daniel Hall at IceTV]

Hi Peter,

If you didn't re-enable the disabled channels then nothing would have been scheduled or re-scheduled on them.

This does feel like more of an issue in your unique setup than something that would happen in an average IceTV setup.

[prl]

If you didn't re-enable the disabled channels then nothing would have been scheduled or re-scheduled on them.

The affected PVR (or rather the one that I cared about whether it was affected) was the one where we actually do our TV recordings to watch, not the test box that missed scanning some frequencies. If I hadn't re-enabled the disabled channels, then nothing would have been recorded on them after the existing timers on those channels had run.

This does feel like more of an issue in your unique setup than something that would happen in an average IceTV setup.

I agree that my setup makes it more likely to happen, but it could happen to anyone where a scan failed to process a frequency because of some temporary problem.

I have now thought of a use case where setting an alternative timer on a disabled service would be useful, but if it's to be left as it is, it would be nice to be able to reverse the re-assignment without deleting and re-creating the series recording.