I'm having the exact same problem as bledsoe.  I installed the program, tried to set up a folder and thought I had done something wrong, so I uninstalled it and am now trying to reinstall it, but says the table already exists and the install craps out.  Just passing this along.  Thanks!

its giving my sql errors even though it hasnt even installed sql yet

 

i think i'll leave i for now as its just messing up my pc. Took me 20 mins to get rid of SQL and still wont let me delete the main folder. And my main harddrive has beng working now stop, even though nothing is running and everything i could find belonging to app was uninstalled/deleted.

Hmm, just a quick reply. I'll have a better look later and see what I find.

As long as the prereq installation has been run, SQLExpress should be all installed and ready for use. I decided not to remove the SQL database upon uninstallation of the application, but at the same time I allowed it to continue install even though the DB is in place. It should tell you the database already exists and ask you if you would like to continue - is this not the behaviour you guys are seeing?

A quick way to remove the database would be to either uninstall SQLExpress (through add remove programs) and make sure the myTV files are deleted from Program Files/Microsoft SQL/somefolder/data/myTV.*

I intend adding proper handling for this in the future, but I need to work a bit more with WiX first.

64bit OSes are not supported at the moment, should have put that in the mail as well, my bad. I'll have this added in the next build though.

So... none of you have got this to work then? I did run through the installer on a "fresh" box here at home before releasing and it went through fine. Have even run through an uninstall now, then reinstalled and whilst it does tell me the database is in place it allows me to continue with the installation - data intact.

moontan: What are the specs on your box? 20 minutes to uninstall SQLExpress sounds very much over the top. I'm sure I could dig out some "recommended" minimums for SQLE, but any machine capable of running VMC fine shouldn't have a problem.
Anywho... Running an uninstall of myTV and then of SQLExpress should clean up any changes made to your machine - all we're basically doing is installing SQLE (downloaded straight from MS through the bootstrapper), adding a few files in ProgramFiles\senseIT\myTV, creating a few (cache) directories under %AppData%\senseIT and finally registering the product with VMC.

As it is based on SQL there are other ways of having this done of course. I'm guessing most of you have a server somewhere in the house? This could be setup as the SQLE server and all data- storage/collection would be done on that box. It's a real easy change in the config file to get this done, however the code to change this config from within VMC isn't there at the moment.

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ahelseth:

64bit OSes are not supported at the moment, should have put that in the mail as well, my bad. I'll have this added in the next build though.

Thats fine :) I can wait. I'll keep my eyes on the thread.

Wonder if any of these are permission problems?  On my own user admin account I get "INVALID APLICATION Unable to launch "myTV" but when logged on as Administrator I get "The myTV program has stopped responding and you will be returned to Windows Media Center"

I am running Vista Ultimate 32bit.

Rich

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Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 -- 2GB Corsair Extreme RAM -- 3TB Storage -- 2 * Blackgold PCI-e Dual Tuners -- 2 * Hauppauge Nova-HD-S2 Tuners -- Gigabyte 8600GT Silent Video Card -- LG Blu-ray/HD-DVD Internal Drive -- Zalman HD160 Case -- Sony Bravia 46x2000

I meant to remove SQL, normal unistalling didnt remove everything and anything that was left couldnt be simply deleted as it seemed to marked read only. Eventually got everything deleted apart from that sql main folder which i could only rename. The installation files for your program dont give me any option to install SQL even though its not installed atm. Any seperate installer just for the SQL part?

StumpyBloke: If you ran VMC the first time after installing myTV as Administrator, then yes, it's a possibility. As it creates a set of cache folders upon first run. If these are created as Admin there are access problems with these running as a normal user.
(However - running VMC as Administrator causes all sorts of other problems also, and should really only be done by developers or if you have a very good reason for doing so).

moontan: Hmm, uninstalling myTV will not touch the SQLE installation. This you'll have to remove through the Control Panel, it should remove all files without having to reboot though (at least it does here). However, if you can rename the folder it does sound like the sqlserver process was perhaps not killed before uninstalling. In this case a reboot should do the trick.

For those of you running into problems and who are comfortable editing the registry, adding the following will allow you to see the errormessage that stops the app from working, which could be handy in localizing the fault,

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\Extensibility] "EnableErrorDetails"=dword:00000001

To remove this again, either delete the key, or set it to dword:00000000.

The ones of you who may inadvertently entered the wrong path for your folders, you can edit this by hand in C:\Users\<YOUR USER NAME>\AppData\Local\Microsoft_Corporation\ehExtHost.exe_StrongName_tyvur121uypbkoi5h52ggz20swnvvrye\6.0.6000.0\user.config sorry about the filename/path, due to the way the Net framework handles .dll configuration (which is basically what any VMC addin is) I have no control over the placement of it (well, without writing a custom config provider that is).

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Bingo!  I think it is working now.  I removed the config file that you pointed to above and then restarted VMC and it seems to be working fine now.  I am currently adding shows, but I thought I would share this with everyone who was having the same problem as I was.  Uninstalling myTV must not remove that file because it didn't help my problem.  Thanks!

Glad to hear that. You'll probably run into more problems, but hey, that's what the whole process is for :)

You're probably correct about the config file. Again, due to the way user configurable settings work in the Net Framework, the config file is always created by the .exe file. Which in the case of a VMC addin is ehexthost as any addin is nothing more than a .dll file.

There are ways around this, but as I'll be adding a proper settings screen anyway I figured I'd leave the config handling as is.

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Ok, on to the next issue.  I was able to add several shows to the DB, but during the procss I hit several small bugs and a rather large one.

The smaller bug would be that on the right side, the potential matches for the show names were overlaid with the beginning of a description of the show.  Since the description and the show name were on the same line and one was typed over top of the other, it made it difficult to read.

The larger bug I hit was as I was adding the shows, the process froze up on my while searching for a match to "Drew Carey Show, The" and it said it could not complete the query and asked if I would like to try again.  I said yes and that caused the program to freeze completely.  Upon restarting it, the program sees that there are new shows, then asks if I would like to add them, then proceeds to lock up.  I changed the drive location to another drive that I have with only a few shows on it, but one of them is "That '70s Show" and it locked up on that one as well.  I'm assuming that because of the "special" characters in the show names (comma and apostrophe) I'm causing issues with the queries, but I thought I would check to see if that is the problem.  Are we allowed to use special characters in naming the shows or will it cause the program to choke and die?  Thanks!

I think I handle special characters, I'll have to double check though. But as I'm using parameterized stored procedures to load/save/process the data it should work.

Comma's are definitely handled as I name my shows the same way, i.e. "Sopranos, the" or "Real Hustle, the". For matching against the online source keywords such as "the" should even be removed from the searchstring. I'm interested in the error message you received asking if you would like to try again though. Whilst I have rudimentary exception handling in there I don't think I implemented anything that would retry a query.

I'll check out the special characters in more detail tomorrow and see where I get.

When you say it freezes, does it just sit there and displays nothing? Do you receive a dialogbox telling you it's frozen would you like to go back to VMC? or does it actually crash VMC? If you select "no" to would you like to add the new shows, does it still freeze or does it take you to the main menu?

I've seen something like this before, never managed to find out what was going on, and it just went away by itself. I'm guessing it may have something to do with doing the online matching (as this is running on the UI thread and will freeze the app), it should however "unfreeze" after a timeout and either bomb out due to there not being any data to work with or display an empty list.

If you don't mind, adding the registrykey I mentioned earlier would help localizing this. I could make it into a .reg file for you if that'd help any.

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Ok, I just did a test. Doing a manual search for "Drew Carey Show" brought back 100 possible matches. This is probably why the application seemed as though it was frozen (actually it was, but would have either timed out or displayed the data in due time).

Did a similar search for "That '70s Show" which brought back 101 possibles.

The worst part about this is the fact that the correct show is almost 100% of the time the first one in the list. However I cannot give you a top 10 or top 15 list of the matches thrown back at me as the XML at that time would be incomplete, throwing an exception if I tried to use it from code.

This is one of the reasons why I'm considering going with a proprietary metadata provider rather than the one I'm using now. I would be able to shape the data more to my liking and could handle it much more efficiently, not only on the searchresult side but also rather than return a list of 15 different images connected to a specific Show I could return just the ones connected to "Law & Order: SVU", "Season 3". The downside of course is I'd need someone to input, update and manage all this data. It could be community driven, but so is the site I'm currently using and in all fairness it's not that good. It would also eat a big chunk of bandwidth - I did offer the current DB to host a mirror for them, which should speed up the access (read: UI freeze) times, but I haven't had a reply as of yet - they also seem to have just moved servers themselves which was supposed to help on processing time, but it looks to me like it's got worse.

As a short term workaround I think I'll add a feature in the next build which will look for a file called show.id (or similar) in the Show folder. This file should contain the 5 digit ID number of the show in question. If the file exists it would grab the data automatically without even giving you an option of which choice to make. Sound good? I know this goes against some of what I've said before about "the plugin should not touch the video folders at all", but it would save quite a bit of time picking and choosing matches.

Oh, the smaller bugs you mentioned are, to use a phrase coined by Microsoft, by design . The data to display is all there (including banners) but the page displaying the data was part of what I lost last time the computer crashed, and since I'm still not 100% sure on how to handle the whole Add shows scenario I just left it as simple as possible for now. Ideas on how to make this easier to use overall will be greatly appreciated - for most people it may not be a problem spending a little time picking and choosing matches to start with - but for some powerusers (like myself) who has several hundred different Shows on their servers it'll take a week and a day to go through them all (especially true when you get 100 possible matches like you did).

For now, if you rename those shows to, oh I dunno, "ZDrew Carey Show, the" it should allow you to process the others in your list - or rather the others until you hit another one which for some moronic reason decides because "the" is in the wrong place is not a close match.

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In my experience with TVLibrary, which when using Ben's collection management app, use the same thetvdb.com, if the series has the word "show" in it, it takes forever to search.  Would it be possible for your app to leave "show" out of the search?  I know "Chappelle's Show" and "The Muppet Show" take an extremely long time, and sometimes time out, so maybe this would be a work around for similar titles while still using thetvdb.com.  Just a suggestion.

Installed on my VMC and pointed it to my tv share but I think having so many shows to go through was causing problems. I received lots of random "Invalid Application" and "Not Responding" errors while trying to add shows. Gave up on that, uninstalled, removed the config, and deleted the myTV table from SQL Express through Management Studio then reinstalled. Second time managed to get "Enter Folder" stuck in as a location so I opened the config and edited that out. This time I created a test folder with only three shows so I could test a smaller sample. Found all three shows and let me select the correct show (noticed that if you hit the up and down buttons before the grow animation completed you can get stuck with multiple "big" choices on the screen but no big deal). Got to the select show screen and now selecting any of my three shows brings up either "Invalid Application" or "Program Not Responding." Also, I was playing with the show selection screen and managed to lose the cursor or something (couldn't hit any direction to get any show to highlight). I'll keep playing and see if I can get a show to start. BTW, I still think this is a great idea and looks very promising. Just labeling the bugs to help them get squashed! :-)

Edit: Apparently myTV is seeing my show folders but is not finding the episodes in the folders. I tested this by creating a new, empty folder named "Family Guy" and sure enough, the program thought that I had a new show. My files are currently named as follows:
Burn Notice.S01E01.avi
but I tried changing the naming scheme to:
S01E01.avi
and the episodes still weren't detected. My current structure is really simple:
<root>
-<Show Name>
--<Files>
If you can tell me what the program expects for a naming convention I'll try changing the names and structure.

Edit2: Tried the following structures with no luck:
<root>
-Burn Notice
--Season 1
---Burn Notice.S01E01.avi
<root>
-Burn Notice
--Season 01
---Burn Notice.S01E01.avi
Also tried those structures with S01E01.avi filenames but no change. Went into the table through Management Studio and manually entered the information for Season 1 and Episode 1. This allowed me to click on the show name and see that there should be a season and episode but clicking on the skinny line that was highlighted caused "Invalid Application." This may be because I was unsure of how to get the images into SQL and so I left those cells null though, unless you are auto-generating images, you may want to consider the fact that not every season and episode on thetvdb has an image.

I've also added a number of shows and am experiencing the same issues that TracerX wrote about.  If I click on any of the show banners, I receive an "Invalid Application" error and clicking on the "Details" button shows the following screen:

It seems to indicate that it can't locate any episodes for the show.  Here's how I have them organized:
\\PCNAME\TVShows1\Futurama\Season 01\Futurama S01e01.avi

Is it having a problem with my placing the seasons in seperate folders or is this just a bug?  Thanks!

[EDIT]
OK, so I tried a single show (Futurama) and just dumped the episodes from Season 1 right into the Futurama folder and I'm still getting the exact same error, so I'm assuming it doesn't have anything to do with my Season folders.  Just thought I'd update this.  Thanks!