[mythtv-users] Question on mythfilldatabase logs and "mythfilldatabase ran, but did not insert any new data into the Guide" message

[Tom Dexter]

On 10/17/19, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:
> On 10/16/2019 08:39 PM, Stephen Worthington wrote:
>> On Wed, 16 Oct 2019 19:04:49 -0400, you wrote:
>>
>>> I'm using the tv_grab_zz_sdjson XMLTV grabber for one OTA source on
>>> SD. Every once in a while the status has that message that says
>>> "mythfilldatabase ran, but did not insert any new data into the Guide
>>> for 1 of 1 sources. This can indicate a potential grabber failure". My
>>> guess is that this is just a timing issue where SD just may have not
>>> yet changed, as it's always clear that the data fetch is working.
> ...
>> I believe that "did not insert any new data" message happens when the
>> number of new programmes is low, not actually zero, or if the time of
>> the most future recording des not change.
>
> It's 100% whether the time of the farthest-future program does not
> change--the number of programs isn't considered and there's no attempt
> to find out if there are "new programs" inserted.  We've had users whose
> data providers put in a bogus, many-years-in-advance episode
> accidentally and, even after they quit sending it, that bad data that
> got put in the database caused the warning to become permanent until the
> user manually deleted the bad program.
>
> The message is often pretty much useless, but, if nothing else, maybe
> should say something about seeing the message continuously for many days
> /and/ seeing a drop in the amount of future data could indicate a
> problem (in the above situation, the problem is the bad far-future
> program, which is not much of a problem, but seeing listings go from 14
> days to 13 to 12 to 11 to 10... is most likely a real sign of a
> problem--though it could be a temporary one with the provider as opposed
> to a problem with the grabber/grabbing process...).  It would be better
> if MythTV "knew" about the approximate number of days your listings
> providers data goes out and warned when we started to drop below that
> number, or, better yet, if it looked for the number of days with similar
> numbers of programs (to discount the one far-future program) over a
> rolling multiple-day period and warned only if that number of days
> dropped a couple or a few days in a row and/or we started to approach a
> day with a "statistically low" number of programs.  That said, making
> those changes would be a lot of coding for very little benefit.
>
> Personally, my preference would be to remove the message completely and
> let the diminishing future listings speak for themselves rather than
> warn/scare people needlessly. :)  Not everyone shares my opinion, so the
> message remains.
>
> Mike

Thanks for the reply, and thanks Stephen. That totally makes sense.
Today's run had no warning, so as I said above, it's likely just a
timing issue related to when SD happens to get new data.

Actually I prefer having the warning, especially now that I understand
what causes it. If I were to see it several days in a row I'd know
there could actually be as issue. That actually happened to me once
and was the grabber failure where I needed to recompile xmltv as I
recall.

Thanks again!
Tom