[advocate99]

There's a bug in the Prime Time Recordings feature.

If I set it up to keep the recordings for one week, they never actually get deleted and always show that that they will be deleted a week after whatever date I happen to look at them.

So, if on 8/12/15, a bunch of recordings get created, they'll show a deletion date of 8/19/15.
But, the next day, on 8/13/15, they'll show a deletion date of 8/20/15.
The day after that, on 8/14/15, they'll show a deletion date of 8/21/15.
And so on.

So, they'll never be deleted.

It appears that when you set the keep until to one-week, you probably also have to set a starting or ending date, and if you don't, WMC never deletes them.

[robmich]

I believe the issue is that when you set a "delete after viewing" or "delete after one week", etc. WMC only follows that rule when storage space is getting tight. It assumes that as long as there is room, why delete as you can always manually delete shows. Krusty, correct me if I am wrong, but the "delete whenever" feature in primetime recordings is to attempt to override WMC settings. Regardless, WMC won't take any action until storage space is gets low.

Rob

[krustyreturns]

It's an override of the whatever the user has set as the default delete setting in wmc. As robmich says, we are not doing the deleting, we are just choosing one of the delete options baked into wmc for the recording. And yeah, as near as I can tell, wmc tries to never delete anything until disk space gets tight in the recording disk partition. When that happens, it uses these delete settings to figure out what it can get rid of first. I get why they did it this way, you can get in more trouble deleting something then not deleting something.

[advocate99]

I don't think that's it.

If you allow PTR to set "one week" as the delete after option, and then you go check the recording in a week, you'll see that WMC reports that it will be deleted exactly one-week later (even though the week has already passed). I believe that ServerWMC is not setting this option correctly in WMC.

[krustyreturns]

ok. I'll check it out.

[advocate99]

I just verified that this is a bug, and the bug is in how ServerWMC sets the keep until setting.

If I set a "one week" setting inside Windows Media Center, it appears to include a date flag that tells it when to delete. So, if I set a recording to "one week" on 8/14/2015, then it'll show that it will delete 7 days later on 8/21. The next day, it'll still show 8/21 as the delete date, but it'll offer me the option to update the one week flag to 8/22. If I wait until 8/21, the file will delete at the end of that day.

However, if I set "one week" inside PTR, I'm guessing you set the "one week" flag, but you fail to populate the date code. So, if PTR sets a "one week" flag on a recording on 8/14, it's show a delete date of 8/21. However, if I check it the next day on 8/15, it'll show 8/22 as the deletion date. If I check it the day after that on 8/16, it'll show 8/23. Since there's no fixed date for deletion, the file will never delete.

In sum, WMC works fine, but ServerWMC isn't setting the one week setting correctly when it creates the timers.

[krustyreturns]

Intersting, I will look for this date code. Naturally (imo anyway) I expected this delete-after-one-week interval would be relative to the recorded date. Based on your efforts though, something must be wrong. I'll let you know what I find.

[advocate99]

It is also possible that this is a WMC bug.

WMC doesn't allow you to set "one week" when you set-up a timer. You can only set one-week by changing an existing recording in WMC. Perhaps WMC didn't implement the one week option in timers because of this bug.

[krustyreturns]

Interesting, if that's the case then I can just set this setting when the recording completes. In checking so far, one thing I've found is that the OneWeek setting is just a preset in wmc for seven days, the value can actually be any number of days.

[krustyreturns]

Your reasoning was right, pretty much across the board. Wmc does not use the timer's 'KeepLength' correctly if it's set to the number-of-days to keep the recording. This value does get transferred correctly from the timer to the recording, but it is not the value the recording needs to make the delete happen correctly, so you get that weird behavior you noticed of the date never getting reached.

But if you set it after the recording is done (the only way wmc lets you do it) basically what happens is KeepLength is set to 'UntilEligible', then it sets a DateTime field called TimeEligible to one week after the recording date.

So I implemented this to happen automatically when a recording completes. It seems to work, but of course I haven't wait a week for the deletion. If you want to test it let me know.

[advocate99]

You can test it tomorrow.

Tomorrow, go into a recording that was made today. Go to change the KeepUntil setting. It'll show you the current KeepUntil setting and will show the anticipated deletion date. It'll also offer you the option to change the anticipated deletion date to one week from that date (one day after the then current deletion date).

Also, I've noticed that PTR changes don't take effect simply by reloading the configuration file. It appears that you have to shutdown and restart the program, or possibly wait 24 hours for the next set of timers to be set. Not sure which...

[krustyreturns]

I'll do that. But I am still wondering if the files really get deleted on that one-week-later day even when the value is set correctly. Maybe you know already?

There are a number of settings that don't get reloaded correctly just by reloading the configuration file, and PTR's are among them. After hand editing the config file, the safest thing to do is restart swmc. We have been lazy about making a reload work for ALL the settings, in fact I am tempted to just remove the 'reload settings file' button altogether.

You should not need to wait 24 hours though, unless the PT interval you just entered/changed has already begun when you restart swmc.