New Plex Guide Very Poor in UK

Yeah, I thought that later on which is why I added the bottom part of the post which does show unknown airings after a manual refresh.

The great british bake off is showing as unknown this evening, despite manually updating the guide. Very frustrating.

I wish there was a way to manually initiate a recording on a set channel and time.

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Agree that would be a good temporary workaround (and potentially useful anyway), particularly if repeat recordings could be set.

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I’ve just added my woe’s to this problem at the bottom of this thread
https://forums.plex.tv/t/new-epg-and-release/425441/809

Except, for me, when there is an on air “Unknown Airing” you get “Playback Error Unable to tune channel (Not on air)” so in effect there is no Channel :rage:

Oh damn! OK would definitely need to be a working version that didn’t have that issue then!!

I have the same issue. The programmes where I have ‘series links’ are the ones which are displaying ‘unknown error’.

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You’re right, as the recording for episode 4 was labelled "S01E05: 5 last night: The Capture - S01E05 - Episode 4.ts

Just stumbled on this nightmare of a thread.

Grand Designs tonight is showing no season or episode numbers (so it’s recording all of them, SD and HD) and I’ve got “unknown airing” on multiple channels.

I hope Plex is getting a refund from the data provider.

The fix for the gaps that shows as Unknown Airing has now been deployed to the live service and I just checked the UK channels and we have zero gaps. The same issue led also to xxx Programming

A full EPG manual refresh would correct all the gaps and xxx programming erroneous entries

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Some channels do not provide episode information and so Grand Designs may not have episode details on all channels, On these channels the airings are defined at TV Show level and we would not know what episodes are being aired. If recording option does not Limit to specific channel then all episodes on the channels that broadcast the TV Show would also get recorded.

Our provider started to manually add season and episode numbers for these channels. The starting point for Grand Designs, is that More 4 and the other More4 subsidiary channels do provide episode info. The other channels such as Channel 4 and 4Seven and HD and +1 variations do not. And you could end up with 4 recordings of every episode.

But with the manual intervention by our provider, episode numbers should start to feed through for these.

Our automatic refresh of the guide does not pick all changes and until we get to automatic night full guide refresh (soon), I would advise users to manually refresh the guide once a day. The refresh would pick any updates to episode numbers that may have been added by our provider

@mr_silver which channel were you using?

@sq2000 Can you therefore tell us which channels we can count on as being reliable knowing that the others are being worked on?

Right now, we have to check everything all the time, so it would be good to know that we only need to focus on a sub-section. You already have my list of channels, but I think everyone would appreciate knowing this.

thanks,
J.

Can you clarify this bit please

More4 does not have any subsidiary channels (unless you class More4 +1)

Channel 4 is the main channel
E4, More4, 4Seven are secondary channels to Channel 4

Grand Designs was on Channel 4 and Channel 4 HD and Plex recorded both. The description of both programs was just a generic description of the entire show.

What I don’t understand is that both xmltv.co.uk and my other TV (using OTA EPG data) both showed the correct description and a season and episode number.

If even the OTA data has it, then surely the guide provider should have it?

I just stumbled across an old thread where @sa2000 says the data is being pulled from Freeview.co.uk

Assuming you were referring to 9pm last night for C4, here is what Freeview had:
52


and ether is what 4HD had (basically, identical)
13

@sa2000 I would have thought that:

  1. Lack of series/episode data
  2. Recording 2 of the same thing at the same time (with identical information)


were different topics??

[edit: typos]

One way round this would be to pull the OTA info from the HDHomerun which should give you super-accurate data for the next 24 hours and then from another source for 24hrs+

@markcs wrote a script for the HDHomerun and you can get it here or here.

Yep, that’s exactly it.

I’m debating installing EPG Collector to transfer the OTA guide data to an xmltv file for Plex to read. It’s a horrible hack but the OTA data seems to be more accurate than Plex’s data provider!

I’m glad I found this thread, it explains exactly what I’m experiencing,

@sa2000 Do you have time frame on fixes for Grand Designs and the Automatic FULL Guide Refresh Nightly?

This post can be closed off - Plex Duplicating Recordings at same time

It is not that clear cut as it varies and it is TV Show specific.

Taking the “Grand Designs” as an example - channels 4Seven and Channel 4 (and the HD and +1 equivalent channels) was specified as a show on these channels with no episode information. When this happens and if the recording settings are defaulted to record on any channel then all airings on these channels would get recorded

Our provider now is entering episode info and at this minute we have only one episode on 4Seven that is still marked as an airing of the Show rather than an episode and so the 26th September 9pm airing on 4Seven will get recorded regardless - and similarly the one on the 4Seven HD channel.

I will be monitoring this and see if this was a one-off and if future airings of Grand Designs on 4Seven or any other channel show up like that, then I will refer it back to our provider

The new airings of Grand Designs for 2019 are date sequenced and that should be ok.