I’ll start out with the compliment: Yesterday, I had a two hour show set to record. In the middle of the day, the network decided to split the show’s airing in half to accomodate a Special Report because of the president’s address. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the EPG had updated to reflect the updated schedule… and adjusted the scheduled recording to one hour (instead of two), so it wouldn’t keep recording during the special report. In 10+ years of using Windows Media Center, I’ve never seen a day-of program guide change like that to accurately accomodate a special report or breaking news situation. Even sites like zap2it & TV Guide didn’t show the change last night. So kudos to Plex & Gracenote for that.
But, then creates the problem: Since the second half of the show was listed in the updated guide with the same episode name/number, Plex didn’t automatically schedule to record it, since it thought it just had (which in reality was just the first half). In fact, I couldn’t even find that second half of the show in the guide until during the special report, when the original show finally showed up in the “Starting Soon” section. (A traditional grid-based guide probably would have solved that problem. Instead, there just appeared to be a gap in the channel’s lineup because I could find the special report, and the show that started an hour after special report, but nothing in between).
Even when the second half did show up in the guide, I couldn’t tell Plex to record it because it wouldn’t re-record a show it thought already existed in the library (which technically it did, but it didn’t). Ultimately, I had to move the file of the show’s first half to a folder beyond Plex’s reach, and keep re-scanning Plex’s TV Library until it realized that episode didn’t exist anymore. And when I could finally schedule the recording, it kept showing a yellow warning triangle with no explaination… until it actually started recording on time. And all this was in the half hour before the show began (again).
When the second half finished recording, I moved the first recording back into the right folder, adding a (Part 1) and (Part 2) to their respective filenames. Plex picked them up as one episode and plays them joined correctly, so the end result is good.
So my big question is… is there a way to manually force a recording of an episode, even if Plex thinks it already exists in the library? I think if I could have done that, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Even if it created a library issue where it initially thought both recordings were two versions of the same thing (adding an incorrect “Play Version…” option or something), I could have corrected that later by adding the (Part 1) & (Part 2) tags to the filenames. I just want everything I need recorded to record, and I’ll willingly sort out the library glitches it may create later.
