I have series recordings setup for Modern Family and Cougar Town.  Both are set to record new episodes only, both shows had new episodes tonight, and neither recorded.  I do see that they are both scheduled to record next week which is also a new episode for both.  I also noticed this issue with my series recording of Jersey Shore which 7MC understandably never seemed to want to record.

 I'm using an ATI DCT tuner with cablecard.

You can add "The Middle" and "Ugly Betty" to that, too. MC7 failed to series-record all four of these programs for me tonight, which were listed in Zap2It as NEW. OTOH, MC7 did record "Law & Order: SVU", which was listed as a RERUN on 2/3/10. Media Center just continues to deteriorate. These are ongoing problems discussed here recently. Experience confirms the only thing to do is to babysit Media Center each and every day, that is, if you want to continue using it. (I know this, but it's still hard to remember. I did remember this recently at the request of a Microsoft guy, who typically for Media Center, failed to acknowledge my message and PM reporting an upcoming scheduling problem several days before it was to happen.) For me, Media Center is becoming less and less viable, and I will not be investing in CableCard until Microsoft fixes this, other basic DVR functionality, and the 1080i/p frame rate bug, or SageTV or something with a more acceptable set of bugs, that is made by a vendor who actually cares about and fixes bugs, is able to use it.

I mean, really. Media Center is not recording new programs, but it is recording reruns. :Facepalm: and FAIL.

I too experienced a failure when attempting to record "Modern Family" and "Cougar Town" last night.  Both shows were set to record new episodes and set to record anytime they might be broadcast.  I know these were new episodes last night, but is it possible these shows were labeled "reruns" within the Media Center Guide?  I'd be interested to hear from someone who successfully recorded the shows to see if they were falsely marked as reruns.

 

Both recorded fine here on comcast

Consideration:

I too experienced a failure when attempting to record "Modern Family" and "Cougar Town" last night.  Both shows were set to record new episodes and set to record anytime they might be broadcast.  I know these were new episodes last night, but is it possible these shows were labeled "reruns" within the Media Center Guide?  I'd be interested to hear from someone who successfully recorded the shows to see if they were falsely marked as reruns.

 

One frustrating thing about the Zap2It-powered Media Center Program Guide is that it's impossible to look back into the past even 1 minute, which is something I would like to do on a fairly regular basis. In contrast, the Zap2It web site lets you go back 18 hours at the least. I can say that the file properties for the "Law & Order: SVU" rerun that MC recorded last night has the "Rerun" flag set to "No". The episode title in the file properties is "Confidential", which is a new episode. The thing is, the episode that aired last night was "Solitary" (thanks Zap2It web site!), which originally aired back on 10/7/2009, which Media Center definitely recorded in its entirety on 10/7/2009 according to the Win7 Event Log. This together with observations I made in this thread suggests to me that MC7 may download guide information but never update it as guide data revisions become available. That's pure conjecture on my part, but it fits the evidence. That is, if MC downloaded the current guide data 2 weeks ago, and the guide data was revised a week ago, and MC didn't pick up on it, that would account for what we've observed. So, I would be interested to know how MC deals with this. It seems to me it needs to download a whole new set of guide data (or at least request revision data if that is possible) at least daily and update its scheduled recordings as necessary, but it isn't doing either.

Add me to the list as well - at least for "Modern Family" - I do not record the others mentioned.  I have it set to series record, new and rerun.  I noticed it wasn't scheduling last nights new episode - but interestingly enough, it did schedule the rerun also showed last night. I manually added the new episode so it would record.  Not sure whose fault it was - Microsoft - Time Warner - Zap2It - ABC .....  It is showing at this point that next weeks new episode will record.

Same here. I am using ATSC and The Middle, Modern Family, & Cougar Town all failed to record.... This is crap! My wife is not happy!

 My system also didn't have Modern Family marked as a new episode last night.  My system has been deleting series recordings on its own lately so I've been in the habit of checking things on a daily basis

My system marked the first 7PM Modern Family as rerun and the 8PM Modern Family is new, but the new one was not Scheduled to be recorded and the when I went to select record the "Record Series" button was missing, however the plain "Record" was still there and I was able to catch it before it started.  Cougar Town (another series we subscribe to) recorded fine for me. 

 Based off of that, it seems that my guide had dissassociated last night's episodes with the Series.  Future episodes are still scheduled. 

Maybe if you add even more bolded words, someone will give you a solution to your problem.

I have the above mentioned series set to record and they both were captured as expected. I have had zero issues with series recordings, unless you count the cases where the series name changed slightly in the guide data. So what can we deduce from this? It demonstrates that some hardware/software/cable/guide combinations work with no issue. Clearly you have a problem, but you cannot say it is all or part MS. Maybe your system is broken, poorly configured, incorrectly configured, using bad guide data, etc. Who knows? I'm pretty sure the drama and rants will not get you any closer to a solution.

tims029334:

You can add "The Middle" and "Ugly Betty" to that, too. MC7 failed to series-record all four of these programs for me tonight, which were listed in Zap2It as NEW. OTOH, MC7 did record "Law & Order: SVU", which was listed as a RERUN on 2/3/10. Media Center just continues to deteriorate. These are ongoing problems discussed here recently. Experience confirms the only thing to do is to babysit Media Center each and every day, that is, if you want to continue using it. (I know this, but it's still hard to remember. I did remember this recently at the request of a Microsoft guy, who typically for Media Center, failed to acknowledge my message and PM reporting an upcoming scheduling problem several days before it was to happen.) For me, Media Center is becoming less and less viable, and I will not be investing in CableCard until Microsoft fixes this, other basic DVR functionality, and the 1080i/p frame rate bug, or SageTV or something with a more acceptable set of bugs, that is made by a vendor who actually cares about and fixes bugs, is able to use it.

I mean, really. Media Center is not recording new programs, but it is recording reruns. :Facepalm: and FAIL.

 

You can add all of last Friday's CBS primetime lineup too.

Here's what I think happened. Friday was that Haiti telethon that replaced the normal programming. All the networks showed the telethon in the guide except for CBS.  It still had its normal progrmaming showing in the guide.  So the telethon came on and MCE thought it was recording normal programming.

There is a really big bug, in my opinion, in the MCE user interface. That is that when a program is recorded and that recording exists in the recording directory, an "i" will appear in the guiide for any subsequent reshowing of the show saying that the program has already been recorded.  BUT, nothing shows up if the recording has been deleted.  The only thing that happens is that the re-shown program doesnt record.

 So, the haitian telethon replaced regular programming and the networks replayed the unshown episodes the next week.  MCE thought it had recorded it the previous week but since I had already deleted the recordings, the recording didnt happen, and it was like the series was dropped.  The series resumed normal recording the next week.

MS really aught to fix that "already been recorded" problem.

This is something I've repeatedly asked about before but with total silence from Microsoft - where does 7MC stored the information about already watched epiisodes and are there any tools to edit this data?

With Vista Media Centre, this information was stored in the recordings.xml file. You could therefore edit this file in a text editor (or XML editor) to reset an episode that Media Centre thought was already recorded. This wasn't particularly end-user friendly, but at least possible.

Within 7MC this information seems hidden within inaccessible database files.

Matthew

mold:

I have had zero issues with series recordings, unless you count the cases where the series name changed slightly in the guide data.

Well, I'm glad you've not had any problems. However, the OP is not the only one getting frustrated by 7MC inexplicitly skipping episodes. In the three months, I've been running 7MC I've had far more missed recordings than in the previous 18 months running Vista MC on the same hardware with the same channel setup. To me, that points to something amiss in 7MC compared to Vista MC! Matthew

 

mdovey:

mold:

I have had zero issues with series recordings, unless you count the cases where the series name changed slightly in the guide data.

Well, I'm glad you've not had any problems. However, the OP is not the only one getting frustrated by 7MC inexplicitly skipping episodes. In the three months, I've been running 7MC I've had far more missed recordings than in the previous 18 months running Vista MC on the same hardware with the same channel setup. To me, that points to something amiss in 7MC compared to Vista MC! Matthew

My post was not intended to solicit any kind of congratulations, but rather to point out that some configurations do work. Identifying what works and what doesn't seem like good steps toward determining if a solution or workaround can be found for those that have problems. Ultimately, Microsoft will fix what they want to fix, when (and if) they want to fix it. In the meantime, the only option is to work with other knowledgeable people here and attempt to come up with solutions. Sometimes there are none, and we have to choose between sticking with Media Center and its flaws, or looking for workarounds or maybe consider other solutions. No amount of complaining on this board is going to make them fix something you or I don't like. Ranting and whining about issues (reference the post by tims029334 I quoted above) serve no purpose if you want to constructively discuss problems and work on solutions.

I want Media Center to be great and work perfectly as much as anyone; I just think we should pursue that goal in a constructive manner. Is that an unreasonable request?

you should be able to set when the guide data downloads...i think the guide data is the real issue here. ideally, the guide data should re-download every day, cross-reference that it is not missing any recordings, and then for good measure, do the same 15 minutes before each scheduled recording.