Recordings and schedules not shown

[chrisjh 2]

I experimented with Emby some time ago, and recently tried it again. My main purpose is to schedule and make live TV recordings. I used version 4.3.0 installed on a Mac mini, took out a month's subscription to Premiere, scheduled some test recordings, checked that the first one worked, and everything was fine. The recording that I had made was displayed under Recordings in the Live TV section, and those that were still scheduled were displayed there under Schedule. So far so good. I then downloaded and installed the latest version of Emby, 4.8.10. There was then nothing displayed under Recordings or under Schedule. The recording that I had made was however still in ~/emby-server/data/livetv/recordings and, when I looked at ~/emby-server/data/livetv/timers.json, it seemed that the scheduled recordings were still set. Thinking that this could be due to a change in data formats between the two versions, I deleted all the data (the ~/emby-server folder) and set up version 4.8.10 from scratch. I scheduled more test recordings. They did not show under Schedule on the Live TV screen, but did seem to be set in the JSON file. The first one was in fact recorded on schedule, and appeared in the recordings folder, but did not show up in the Recordings section of the Live TV screen.

I tried downloading the beta version to see if this was a bug that had been fixed. The Recordings and Schedule sections on the Live TV page were still blank. (The file that I downloaded from the beta version link was named 4.8.10 rather than 4.8.14, so I'm not sure whether I actually downloaded the beta version or not.)

So I reverted to version 4.3.0. I had to delete all the data and start from scratch again, but it did then work as expected. I have no problem with staying on 4.3.0, but feel that this is a problem that should be fixed and so I am reporting it to the community.

Generally, Emby feels like a good software package, it has the features I need, and the user interface is better organised and more intuitive than on similar packages that I have tried. I'm surprised to have encountered this problem, and not to have seen any discussion of it in the forums, which I did check before posting. Has anyone else experienced anything like this, and are the developers aware of it?

[Carlo 4461]

Hi,

Version 4.8.10 sets up recordings differently than previous versions.

Try setting up the DVR from scratch on 4.8.10 and see if you have better success.

Carlo

[chrisjh 2]

Thanks, Carlo, for your response! 

I think I can see what happened. "Setting up the DVR" on version 4.8.10 seems to have changed from previous versions. The help page on the web says to "Click DVR in the administrator dashboard under the Live TV menu". This menu item is no longer there, but the things it covered look to be in the Advanced tab on the Live TV menu page. 

I went to that tab and, without changing anything, clicked Save at the bottom, and scheduled a recording. It showed up under Schedule in the Live TV section of the home page as it should, and started on time, and was removed from under Schedule when it started. However, it did not then show up under Recordings. 

Reviewing the Live TV Advanced menu page, I suspected that this might be because I left the "Default recording folder" entry blank. I then found that the system had automatically created a Recordings library at the default location, and I set the Default recording folder to this on the Live TV Advanced menu page. At last the recordings did show up under Recordings in the Live TV section of the home page as they should do.

I haven't rechecked this, but I don't think I set the DVR up on version 4.3.0. I think it was set up with the default options without me doing this. It seems, though, that version 4.8.10 needs an explicit DVR options set-up. I suggest that the user friendly thing to do would be to revert to the practice of automatically setting up the DVR with the default options, and to revert to having an explicit DVR set-up page rather than putting the DVR options in an Advanced tab, which many users won't look at. I also suggest that the documentation on the web might need some slight revision.

Now that this has been sorted out, I'm looking forward to using the system :=)
 

[Luke 38556]

Thanks for following up!