Changed format of Schedule files?
Apologies on the version numbers, It is 7.4.
There have been eight 7.4,x,x releases. Can you be more specific and include ALL of the digits of the release you are using now, and which one you were using previously?
That said, I tried this on schedules that were created on 7.4.1.6 or earlier and I was able to change the file extension to .ZIP and extract the files. When I attempt on a schedule I created with 7.4.1.9 (the latest release) this past Friday March 24, 2023 and got an error message connected to the databases. But if I went to extract it using 7-zip (a free zip utility) it would get the same error message, but it would go ahead and extract all of the files successfully.
I'm not an employee of EW and more than likely none of them will be around to look into this until Monday during their regular business hours so I would suggest for now to download and install 7-zip and use that for now until EW Support has a chance to chime in. You can download it from 7-zip dot org (I can't post an actual link as there is no EW Support Person available to okay the post with an outside link). It will create a group of Right Click Context Menus in File Explorer. I right click on the EWSX file (no need to change the extension to .ZIP), left click on 7-zip, and select Extract To (Folder Name) and it will extract the files to the folder mentioned. It will show an error message in the 7-Zip program, but you can ignore that.
Hopefully that works out for you.
Thanks, Donal -
I don't know what the previous version was, but I think it was a 7.3 release. I know the current version was 7.4.1.9.
I will give 7-zip a shot to see if it works. I won't be able to try it until Wednesday. Hopefully will hear something from the EW folks before then.
Dan Willard
I did do a test on this and am getting the same thing. I will add it as a bug for our developers to take a look at.
You can easily copy the media using a USB drive. In EW, right-click on the media and select Open file location and you can copy and paste the media you want to your USB drive, cloud storage, network...
Dan Willard
7-zip should work to extract the files if you need to. It might give you an error, but it will still extract the files.
Can I ask why you need to extract the files that way?
In EW, you can do a check for changes in the schedule to import all your songs, media, and presentations into your resources from the schedule.
Dan - Thanks for the comment / confirmation. I had an earlier thought of downloading actual ZIP software, rather than using Windows Explorer, so this helps confirm it. I will verify tomorrow night.
We have a team that builds the schedule for EW which includes a welcome video, title screen, closing video, etc. Our LiveStream team then pulls the schedule to extract those to use as independent inputs to our LiveStream. Most of these files are only used once or twice, so they are not natively stored on the EW computer.
We have tried other ways and this works the best for our setup.
I installed 7-zip tonight and was able to extract the files. It is a couple extra steps that will confuse some of our volunteers, but we can work through that in the short term. Hopefully whatever broke this capability will get resolved so we can go back to using Windows Explorer. Thanks for the advice!
Thomas Lutman
I just updated EW 7.6 to 7.7 (latest version shown). Since updating, I have not been able to extract the videos and images as I used to.
In last version, I could copy the .eswx file to a different folder, then rename it to .zip and extract the files. Since the update, I get an "unspecified error is preventing me from copying the file..." message.
Did the format of the eswx file change with the new update?