Is there a way to debug the recording schedule?

General Discussions Plex Features
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I’m having a fair bit of trouble getting DVR recordings to work properly and reliably (I have an HDHomeRun Extend tuner), that seems to be related to the programming guide. The behaviour is rather hard to describe - please bear with me.

For example, one of my scheduled recordings is for a news show that airs Saturday and Sunday at 11:00 pm, as well as Sunday at 6:30 am (CTV National News with Sandie Rinaldo, listed on the tuner channel of 3.1 CFRNDT (Independent) ) . I’ve set it to record all episodes, new and repeat airings, to try and make sure it doesn’t miss anything. Yet it seems to skip recording often - particularly the later showings.

In the Program Guide, it says “Recording Scheduled”, though often in the upcoming episode list it sometimes doesn’t list one of the three airings. And if I click on “Recording Schedule”, it usually doesn’t show one or more of the airings there either, though from what I can tell it should.

To try and troubleshoot, I went to the live “Program Guide” on the Plex TV app at 10:45 pm on Sunday. The show was listed as “Starting Soon”, and had the 3 or so red dots on the poster for the show, which from what I understand, indicates that it would be recorded. Yet, when I clicked on “Recording Schedule”, it didn’t show up as an upcoming show.

When 11:00 pm rolled around, clicking on “Program Guide” and the show in the “On Right Now” section, brought up a screen saying “Recording Scheduled”, airing “Now on 3.1 CFRNDT (Independent) - 26 min left”. And at the same time, nothing indicated that it was being recorded in the “Recording Schedule” section of Plex, and sure enough, when the show was done, nothing was saved.

I’m running Plex Media Server 1.12.0.4829-6de959918 - the current version of Plex according to Synology’s package manager as well as Plex’s downloads web site.

Are there logs or information I can find somewhere to try and figure out why the show said “recording scheduled”, even while it was being broadcast, and was never recorded? This happens a lot. I’m wondering if the rebroadcast news in the morning messes it up, though as I mentioned, it is set for “new and repeating airings”, so that shouldn’t matter… and even if it was, I believe the rebroadcast on Sunday at 6:30 am is from the Saturday at 11:00 pm showing, not the Sunday at 11:00 pm showing which wasn’t recorded.

Thanks for any advice on how to try and figure this out.

Dan

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I may have sorted this out, though I’m going to hold of flagging the question as solved until it’s been confirmed.

Turns out it may have been a problem with how I interpreted what “New and Repeat Airings” meant, in conjunction with an error in the program guide. I’d presumed that “New and Repeat Airings” would mean it would always record the show, no matter if Plex already had recorded the episode in the past. But in further research, it looks like Plex will not record an episode it already has (any way of convincing it otherwise??) Instead, it looks like that option will tell Plex to record all airings regardless of whether they are broadcast for the first time on TV, but will still not record an episode it thinks it has recorded before.

The other factor of the problem was that the EPG lists the Sunday @ 6:30 am with the same episode number as the Sunday @ 11:00 pm airing, when it really should have the same episode number as the Saturday @ 11:00 pm airing. So that might explain why it liked to record the Sunday @ 6:30 am airing (which was actually Saturday evening’s news), and then skip the Sunday @ 11:00 pm airing, thinking it already got it from the 6:30 am airing.

I’ve modified the recording to limit the airing time to 11:00 PM, which by looking ahead at the recording schedule, seems to convince it to record Sunday @ 11:00 pm instead of Sunday @ 6:30 am, which is ultimately what I want anyway.

So we’ll see this weekend if it works. In the meantime, is there an option in Plex somewhere that I’ve missed that tells it to just record every airing of a show that appears, regardless of whether Plex thinks it’s recorded that episode already?

Dan

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There are other shows that exhibit this same type of behavior, Coronation Street does the same thing. Multiple episodes with the same episode data based on a date will also fail to record the 2nd airing of the show. Plex is currently looking into this issue. They thought they had it figured out with the Olympics but the fix for the Olympics did not resolve the issue for Coronation Street. Hopefully they will have a fix soon for this issue.