Formula 1 Racing recording failures

Live TV & DVR
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1

Server Version#: plexmediaserver-1.41.5.9522-a96edc606.x86_64, OpenSuSE Leap 15.6
Player Version#: N/A (not a playback issue)
Tuner Make/Model: TVHeadend/tvhProxy (not at fault)
Guide/Lineup name: Cannon Falls, MN 55009 HBC Digital Plus
Using XMLTV?: No
Channel number/Name: ESPN HD (122) and others
Plex Media Server Logs_2025-03-22_08-12-01.zip (5.2 MB)

Plex, it’s happening again. Multiple episodes of weekly events are being dropped from recording BEFORE the scheduled event, and the object is removed from the scheduled. It’s not a tuner issue, this is taking place before the tuner would be called.

For example, thus far this weekend for the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai, the only recording I have is for the Sprint episode. None of the practice or qualifying episodes have recorded, and the events no longer show up in the schedule.

What’s happening? This has been happening for the last several years.

2

Your logs don’t go back far enough to show what happened after the sprint race was recorded (they only go 2:58 AM local time).

If the qualifying events showed in the schedule before the sprint recording and disappeared afterward, it likely means that the DVR thinks it (the qualifying) is a different airing of the existing (sprint) recording, and thus removed it because thinks it would be a duplicate.

How did Plex name the sprint recording? Was it something like “Formula 1 Racing - Chinese Grand Prix” with a date suffix? Does “Sprint” or some other distinguishing word appear anywhere in the name?

If all the different events associated with the race show in the guide with the name “Formula 1 Racing - Chinese Grand Prix” with only differing descriptions, any of them on the same date will be considered different airings of the same episode as far as the DVR is concerned.

Does the actual race still appear in the schedule? The logs make it appear so, as it would be considered a different “episode” based on the date.

3

Timing is indeed part of the problem, as these events are held around the world.

I am using the EPG as provided by Plex (yes, I know, from Gracenote,) and the displayed names in the Plex clients (Roku, Android, web app,) appear as generally the race name and type of particular event. For today, that was something on the order of “Chinese Grand Prix, Qualifying.” I’ve been wondering about the duplicate issue, and that’d indicate something rather wrong in PMS internals, as I’ve gone so far as to completely remove last season. These are all new episodes, if PMS is deciding they’re duplicates, that’d be an issue. I think the only type of episode that’s broadcast in duplicate is the race itself, back into prime viewing hours for me.

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That’s my current EPG display. The Sprint captured properly late last night (9:55 PM local time,) and the Qualifying episode schedule entry was displayed while I watched the Sprint live. I wanted to watch Qualifying this morning, nothing was captured, and the episode is completely gone from the Guide.

What’s really funny is that the drops seem to affect the same episodes, i.e. Practice 1 and Practice 3 during a race weekend don’t get recorded.

4

Based on those names shown on the DVR schedule, this is almost certainly a duplicates issue. They’re both called ‘Formula 1 Racing.’ So the only thing which would distinguish the different episodes would be the date.

For date-based episodic content, Plex appends the date as the episode information. So, for example, something which aired today might get a name like “Show Name - 2025-03-22.ext” instead of the normal “Show Name - SxxEyy.ext.” So for any “Show Name” aired on the same date, it would be a duplicate.

I think that’s what’s happening here. Since all the events are just called “Formula 1 Racing” in the guide, multiple events, even if they have different descriptions, will be considered the same episode, just a different airing. And thus a duplicate and removed from the schedule once the first airing is recorded.

What was the final name of the sprint “episode” when it landed in your library? I mean the actual folder and filename?

5

If what you’re saying is accurate…it’s clearly an issue with PMS not being able to deal with EPG data correctly, and will guarantee missed recordings. Plex either needs to address this in the incoming feed from Gracenote, or in it’s internal match facilities. This is a decidedly atypical series in that multiple episodes can be new in a single day. I discovered a year ago that even if I have one of the recording failures being displayed on a client that PMS will under some circumstances that I don’t yet fully understand to commit it to disk. The “Formula 1 Racing” is the series name, the individual episode names are not displayed until I open the schedule entry.

Here’s what i have for the Chinese Grand Prix:

-rw-r–r-- 1 plex plex 6661912148 Mar 21 04:34 Formula 1 Racing (2000) - 2025-03-21 07 00 00 - Chinese Grand Prix Practice 1.mkv
-rw-r–r-- 1 plex plex 6769679116 Mar 22 04:01 Formula 1 Racing (2000) - 2025-03-22 07 00 00 - Chinese Grand Prix Sprint.mkv

Yes, the Sprint episode completed early this morning, before the Qualifying episode began (okay, I do have a 120 minute extension in the schedule, this is a sporting event and subject to a lot of things that can cause it to run long.) FWIW, the schedule entry for the sprint lists the episode as “Chinese Grand Prix, Sprint” and the race tonight as “Chinese Grand Prix.” The next race is 2 weeks out, and I don’t see it in the EPG at all yet.

6

Unfortunately those filenames pretty much confirm it. Anything from that series which airs on the same date will be considered a duplicate and thus not be recorded. The DVR doesn’t use the episode name (Chinese Grand Prix Practice 1 or Chinese Grand Prix Sprint) to disambiguate. Only the series name and the date.

As it is, those in your library are episodes 2025-03-21 and 2025-03-22. So, I would expect that the race early tomorrow morning should successfully record as episode 2025-03-23.

I don’t think there’s a good workaround for this right now, other than for you to perhaps manually Plex Dance the recording immediately after it airs, changing the name in the process to something like “Formula 1 Racing - S2025E14.ext.” That’s what watch.plex.tv has for the episode information for the Chinese GP sprint. That should clear the way for the DVR to add the next date-based episode back to the schedule (you may have to open up the schedule entry and save it again to have it pick up the change).

There might also be the option of Using XMLTV guide data as well, if you can find a source (and that provides unique show names for each type of event).

I think this is just an edge case that Plex didn’t really foresee. Perhaps there’s an opportunity for a feature request here to allow for disambiguation by episode name in cases where the same date-based show airs twice on the same date? Or something similar.

I could also be completely wrong about all this. If you catch it early enough next time and can grab some server logs from immediately after recording an event which results in future ones being removed, it may either confirm or refute my assumptions.

For what it’s worth, I think this caused similar problems during the Olympics for certain airings which appeared to be, from the DVR’s perspective, duplicates. It was as impactful there as NBC generally gave most of the segments unique series names. But it did cause some issues for some.

7

I’ll see if I can snag logs from when this occurs again. So, even though the EPG shows a particular event as “new”, PMS is deciding that’s not accurate and is calling it a duplicate recording. A lot of this happens between midnight and 0800 local time as these events are held around the world.

8

As far as I know, the new flag is only evaluated when initially scheduling a recording. As soon as something is added to your library, the recording schedule is reevaluated for duplicates and any thing determined to be one is pruned from the schedule.

Yeah, I thought those happened at pretty bad hours for active library maintenance.

9

Observationally, I have watched the scheduled entry disappear from the DVR schedule only a minute or two immediately prior to the event start. No other DVR activity was happening within a couple of hours.

10

Looking out through the EPG, the next time this will occur will be Friday, April 4.

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The first episode is the Japanese Grand Prix, Practice 2, the last one is the Japanese Grand Prix, Practice 3.

11

I’ll keep an eye out. Unfortunately I use an OTA tuner and so do not have ESPN. So I can’t test this myself.

12

Worse… I’m probably going to be otherwise engaged when this happens… think I’ll set up a cron job to snag all of the logs at 9:30 PM.

13

I am having the same problem with the NCAA Mens Basketball tournament. The guide data that I am using has the same title so Plex will not record multiple games in the same day.
I am using xTeVe. To get around the problem I had to Map the channel with XMLTV: xTeVe Dummy and use the 30 Minutes channel. This gives every 30 minute timeslot a unique name. I loose the guide data but I can record the individual programs.

14

Crud… while I’m around, it’s already failed on Practice 2 for the Japanese Grand Prix, and I didn’t catch it in time to get the logs.

I did just notice something else… unlike a lot of other series, the individual files names do not have the season & episode numbers embedded within, i.e. S2025E12, and so forth.

15

So, it recorded Practice 1 as “Formula 1 Racing” but didn’t include season/episode information? But it didn’t record Practice 2.

I think the lack of SyyyyEnn is probably correct, at least initially. Initially it pulls metadata from what’s in the guide. It’s only later that it will get season/episode information (maybe) if it’s matched to something on watch.plex.tv and metadata is refreshed. That’s my understanding, at least.

I was really hoping we’d be able to see in the logs where it rejiggered its schedule based on the new recording. It may be necessary to increase number of log files captured to get more information the next round. This document describes how to adjust hidden server settings; in particular, LogNumFiles can be configured to capture more logging.

The default number of log files is 5. Have a look to see how quickly they’re rolling and adjust the number of log files such that you’ll be able grab them before the event falls off, if you can.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/201105343-advanced-hidden-server-settings/

16

Look up, I posted a long listing of a couple of episodes from the China event. Name elements include the series name, the major event name, the specific event, and timestamp. That’s all from the EPG, and thus, Gracenote.

-rw-r–r-- 1 plex plex 1550202815 Mar 13 22:31 Formula 1 Racing (2000) - 2025-03-14 07 00 00 - Australian Grand Prix Practice 1.mkv
-rw-r–r-- 1 plex plex 2381561230 Mar 15 02:03 Formula 1 Racing (2000) - 2025-03-15 07 00 00 - Australian Grand Prix Qualifying.mkv
-rw-r–r-- 1 plex plex 8840372447 Mar 16 07:22 Formula 1 Racing (2000) - 2025-03-16 07 00 00 - Australian Grand Prix Race.mkv
-rw-r–r-- 1 plex plex 6661912148 Mar 21 04:34 Formula 1 Racing (2000) - 2025-03-21 07 00 00 - Chinese Grand Prix Practice 1.mkv
-rw-r–r-- 1 plex plex 6769679116 Mar 22 04:01 Formula 1 Racing (2000) - 2025-03-22 07 00 00 - Chinese Grand Prix Sprint.mkv
-rw-r–r-- 1 jkalchik users 8820723123 Mar 23 16:32 Formula 1 Racing (2000) - 2025-03-23 07 00 00 - Chinese Grand Prix.mkv
-rw-r–r-- 1 plex plex 2971614727 Apr 4 01:27 Formula 1 Racing (2000) - 2025-04-04 07 00 00 - Japanese Grand Prix Practice 1.mkv

17

Yep, I understand. Those are the names I expect (the yyyy-mm-dd format), not the SyyyyEnn format (I probably misread, but it seemed like maybe you were expecting the latter format). Unfortunately, Plex doesn’t use anything past the yyyy-mm-dd (the timestamp, which I don’t believe is real, or the specific event) for disambiguation.

So, for example, it would consider the following to be duplicates (if the second one existed):

Formula 1 Racing (2000) - 2025-04-04 07 00 00 - Japanese Grand Prix Practice 1.mkv
Formula 1 Racing (2000) - 2025-04-04 07 00 00 - Japanese Grand Prix Practice 2.mkv

Even though the second file name would actually different if recorded, it’s still considered a duplicate airing because the show name (Formula 1 Racing) and the episode information (2025-04-04) are the same. The logs should show this.

This is an example from my DVR. It’s considering whether or not it should record an episode of Stargate SG-1 for which I have a standing scheduled recording. The episode is already in my library.

Mar 31, 2025 12:09:58.680 [0x700009c6f000] DEBUG - There were 1 top-level paths for Stargate SG-1.
Mar 31, 2025 12:10:35.207 [0x70000aac3000] DEBUG - There were 1 top-level paths for Stargate SG-1.
Mar 31, 2025 15:32:13.135 [0x700009bec000] DEBUG - [Req#267a37/Transcode] MDE: Stargate SG-1 - S4 E18 - The Light: selected media 0 / 54500
Mar 31, 2025 15:36:47.758 [0x70000a18d000] DEBUG - There were 2 top-level paths for Stargate Universe.
Apr 01, 2025 04:35:12.223 [0x700009ae6000] DEBUG - EPG: Matched show to 'Stargate SG-1' in library.
Apr 01, 2025 04:37:17.504 [0x70000a6ab000] DEBUG - Subscription: Found existing library item 'Stargate SG-1' (1207)

I’d hoped that we’d be able to find something similar in your logs to validate my theory (or not find it in the logging and invalidate it).

At any rate, I don’t really have any good suggestions for working around this limitation. We can only hope someone with Plex takes an interest in this issue. I’d try to reproduce it myself, but I just don’t have any sporting events in my lineup which would trigger this kind of behavior. The closest thing I’ve seen is similar behavior during the last couple of Olympics.

18

What the heck… increased the lognumfiles attribute from the default of 5 to 20 (and gave the volume another 16gb…) I expect this to happen again tonight, Practice 3 starts at 9:25 PM, and Qualifying is at 12:55 AM (4 hours later.) The race is at 11:55 PM tomorrow.

19

And 20 log files were not sufficient. Increased to 40. And it did fail to record the Japanese Qualifying episode.

20

Failure just now, in the Bahrain event. The Practice 2 episode has been dropped as a duplicate.

I can’t upload all of the logs (80 saved) due to max size exceeded. Here’s all of the logs dated since 0800 this morning.

plex_logs.zip (6.3 MB)