The Official AVS Dish DTVPal DVR Topic! - Page 419

The Balt zip code gives me a perfect clock, but not perfect TVGOS. I only see a few days now, not the full extended data (7-8 days as has been said). So I have a tradeoff here.

I'v seen the Baltimore TVGOS provide the full 7 or so days of guide for the Baltimore stations and non for the DC stations.

However, the DC TVGOS seems to provide the full 7 or so days guide for BOTH DC and B'more stations.
So far I am pretty sure I have seen it(DC clock) go from 2 minutes slow to 4 minutes fast this morning. (Between 8 and 9 am).

Mabuttra is the best source for what is and isn't actually included within the guide data. My engineering guess would be that the simplest nationwide implementation from ROVI's point of view is to propagate a single, unified, un-differentiated "data package" to every ROVI encoder across the country and to have every one of those encoders insert the entire data package into the broadcast stream. As you said yourself, it's just a few hundred KB of essentially "text data" 8 times per day, neglibible in the context of 19 Mb EVERY SECOND at the broadcaster. The data package would only be "parsed" for locally relevent content by software/firmware in the end-user device.

To do otherwise and parse the guide data either outbound from the ROVI mothership and/or at each individual ROVI encoder box would certainly require significant setup/administration effort on the part of ROVI and/or the local broadcaster. I strongly doubt that ROVI would set things up this way.

So my GUESS is that the same guide content is received by your DVR regardless of where it gets its TVGOS stream from. The zipcode setting in the DVR most likely drives the local parsing of the data for your local channels. So when you set Baltimore ZIP and see only 48 hrs of DC guide listings, those are PSIP listings you're looking at for thos DC channels. Didn't you also say that you only have 48 hrs of listings for BALT channels when you have a BALT ZIP set? If that's the case, I don't think you're getting a TVGOS stream from anywhere. When you had DC ZIP set, did you see a full week of guide data for DC stations?

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Greetings,
I took another look at the DTVPal's time settings. Last night, the DTVPal missed about the last 4 minutes of Friday Night Lights. I can see the current time setting is about 4 minutes past what it should be set at. If the actual time is, say, 10:00 pm, the TVGOS says it is 10:04 pm. When I go into the menu to try to reset the TVGOS's time, it will not let me. Everything is greyed out. Even if I try to take it off the Eastern Daylight setting to see if I can make my own adjustment of the current time, I can not make any adjustments to it. It appears that the TVGOS is in control and not giving the correct time. It would be a pain to have to manually edit each and every time for each program I want to record. Is there any way to override the TVGOS's time?????
Thanks... Gary

Glad you find the reason - unfortunately your 'boat' [DVR] came into the same 'Bermuda triangle' [ROVI timestamps wrong delivery time].

You should read last month's sub-discussion relate to the issue in Austin and DC area.

Where are you locating ?

Since I switched to Balto. zip and point my antenna that way, clock is correct - some detail descriptions for DC stations programs show No Information - but details are available for Baltimore equiv.

For how many days ? Thinking if you getting TVGOS from Balto or not.

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I am in the Reston area (DC area).
What is a good Baltimore zip code to use?
Thanks... Gary

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Greetings,
I think it worked! I chose the Balto. zip code 21211 and I had the Wizard go through and re-do the channel choices and it reset the time correctly.
I took a look at the TVGOS guide and it still gives me the 7 days and all looked normal. I hope this fixes the problem. Looks like it did.
Thanks much for the information.
Sincerely, Gary

Added later... False alarm... The time went back to being 3-4 minutes later than it should be. @!@##$%^&* Now what????

Post # 12442 provides the entire TV Guide listings from DC then Baltimore. That is, at my point in the space-time continuum.

In post #12565, I gave an account of my zip code resets switching between DC and Baltimore.

My CM Pal was set to zip 21210 (Baltimore) on 4/5/11 which corrected the time skew. On 4/8/11 my zip was restored (near DC) and the dvr has had no issues.

My DishPal #1 never had a time skew.

My Dish Pal# 2 was set to zip 21210 on 4/5/11. This corrected the Pal clock. Yesterday (4/22/11) at 7:10PM, I restored my DC zip. At 12:45AM today, the Baltimore Guide listings remained intact but with only PSIP listings for DC. At 2:04AM, the full DC Guide listings were present. As of 8:15PM today, the clock has remained within seconds of the Atomic Time.

So, my 3 Pal dvrs acquired the correct time and have the DC and Baltimore TV Guide listings.

So, goddi 1; gary-in-dc; and ss_sea_ya: Any brave soul want to replicate my experiment? Here's how:

Set your Pal to zip code 21210 at 6pm. At 7pm the next day, set it back to your actual zip code (or a DC zip). Record an inter-dimensional episode of Fringejust in case. And, the next day check your Pal clock and listings.

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When you re-set your zip code, did you also have the Pal re-scan the channels? I ask because when the re-scan is done, it goes through the 'acquiring the time' process. Or do you just enter a new zip code directly only.
Thanks... Gary
P.S. After the first attempt in changing the zip code and re-scanning the channels, it corrected the time but then it went back to the incorrect time. I just did it again, and it seems to have corrected the time. Not sure how long it will stay corrected. I'll report later.

Sorry to hear this. If WUSA (the DC CBS station) is still "broken", I'm still stuck using Balt TVGOS. Perfect clock, partial TV show info = oh well.

For the first 7 months of ownership, the clock was perfect and I BELIEVE we always had a full week of TV Guide data. In retrospect, I wish we'd checked the latter more often, but I do know that the few times we made use of the future data, it was there.

As to your last question, I just checked and we are NOT getting guide data beyond today's info, at least when checked in the early morning. It's 7:30 AM Sunday, all data for all channels in both cities is shown, but if I jump to Monday, nothing. The guide shows "No information" for all stations both in Wash DC and Baltimore. If that implies PSIP, I don't understand why the clock setting page announces that the clock was set by TV Guide. Maybe it's possible to have split data sources, a hybrid situation, where some data comes from PSIP and other data comes from TVGOS.

With a similar setup, our clock is great but we have to live without future programming data from TV Guide for either city. In case it matters, we have firmware updates disabled now.

We can watch all the stations we expect in both cities (sometimes without rotating the antenna), but my earlier comment about being down now to only 2-3 days of advance TVG show info is no longer the case. This morning I could see one day out. Of course I have no clue about what's truly going on, either things are varying here or maybe I need to make observations every 30 minutes (30 seconds?!). The clock is still good (but let me whisper that....).

When you say your TV Guide listing info is okay, how many days can you look forward and still see advance data? Second, are you doing daily reboots via the updates function?

I intend to try flipping my zip code from Baltimore back to Wash DC again, the correct one for me, but not until after a few more days of observations.

And you're seeing the time flip from correct to incorrect with a DC zip code? IOW, ch 9.x still appears to be faulty?

Hmm. Interesting. I didn't think of the channel scan. But, I didn't need it, so the answer is no.

For whatever reason, 2 weeks ago on Tuesday between about 5:30PM and 6:15PM, I was able to reset the clock back and forth almost instantly. That is why I suggested setting the Baltimore zip code at 6PM. I'm wondering if that quick response always happens at that time of day. The reason for the 7PM DC zip code reset is to avoid that busy TV Guide Broadcast period. As the guys in Austin learned, 6:15PM is what I'm dubbing the witching hour because it begins an almost 8 hour dead zone, during which TV Guide listings aren't broadcast (ostensibly leaving clean bandwidth for the clock transmission).

So the sequence I used was: Menu-Setup-System Setup-Installation- Zip Code-21210-Done. Soon afterward, the View Live TV button called up the correct time. When I reset DC's Zip a few minutes later, the View Live TV displayed the skewed time. So, I reset to 21210 (21220 also works well) and the clock reset correctly almost immediately. Now, I suspect that if I had waited until 7PM to reset to the DC zip code, the clock would have remained correct even then.

There must be a reason why one of my Pals never skewed. From reading the Adventures in Austin the time of the clock set seemed like the crucial variable.

When you did a channel scan, you introduced some other variables. As others have read the Gemstar synopsis: When it first scans, the device sets the clock to the first TV Guide broadcast it finds and only later does it correlate the clock to the Guide in the appropriate zip code.

What time of day did you initiate the channel scan? Maybe if it's done at 7PM, it would have the same effect as a zip code reset.

The vulnerability I see in using the DC Guide (& clock), is anything (e.g. a power outage) that causes a reboot at the wrong time of day could lead to the skewed clock. But as of now, all three dvrs are set to my zip code, are receiving the full DC Guide and the clocks are within 3 seconds of the Atomic Time.

My update option has been turned off since day one. When 2 of my Pals were set to zip code 21210, the TV Guide displayed 7+ days for the Baltimore channels. My CM-Pal was changed back to DC (at 7PM) after three days and has been displaying the full 7+ days of DC & Baltimore Guides with the correct time for 2+ weeks. At 7PM Friday my Dish Pal was reset to DC and by 2:04AM Saturday was displaying the full Guide info also.

Your situation seems problematic. The Guide emblem is displaying but we can probably assume you're not actually receiving the programming data. Since PSIP time in DC is pretty accurate, we don't know if you're actually getting the Baltimore clock. Maybe if you detail the sequence you used attempting to acquire the Baltimore Guide, including approximate time of day, someone can deduce what's going wrong. Until you can display the 7 days of Baltimore TV Guide info, you're probably not actually locked onto it.

For years, I owned an Antennacraft self-contained amplified rotating antenna. It was the only one that could pull in a reasonably ghost free signal on most analog stations because it was fairly directional. The first 2 generations of ATSC tuners were mediocre at rejecting secondary signals so I continued using it. Once I started using the TV Guide centric LG dvr, I discovered rotating the antenna could disrupt the Guide acquisition so I replaced it with a silver sensor and optimized its direction for the highest priority stations and left it there.

Is your beam antenna that long unidirectional design? In really problematic locations, that might still be necessary, but the Pal's tuners seem amazing at rejecting static secondary signals. I'm using two Antennacraft HDX1000s spaced 4 feet apart and combining the signals to get Baltimore and DC. That never worked with earlier tuners.

It may be that you will be able to return to The DC Guide with a 7PM zip code reset. But, you might want to wait until one of the others confirms it works at another location.

To repeat what I said in my previous post: reseting back to DC at 7PM has worked on both Pals but a power interruption or any other reboot at the wrong time of day could restore the time skew. In which case, I'll try the same fix

I just noticed yesterday that after about 3 days out, I'm getting "no information available" in the guide. I wonder if that's why the clock issue seems to have improved. TVGOS logo is still there. Is anyone else seeing this? Thoughts?

That can happen in any area once in a while. In my area it usually corrects itself before it reaches the current day.

Someone in the Sony forum from Austin is also having problems getting listings. So it must be a problem at KEYE.

Mark

My experience is that once the DVR has acquired TVGOS and set the clock the logo stays until you do a reset to factory even if the TVGOS signal disappears.

Yep, both DVRs showed "no info" for ALL CHANNELS starting at 4:00am Tuesday morning (4/26). TV Guide logos remained in top-right corner of guide. Clock set screen still showed "Time acquired from TV Guide".

I just did a factory reset on one of the DVRs and as expected it came back up with the Clock set screen unlocked and no TV Guide logo in the guide display. One minor surprise is that the guide on this reset machine (now surely 100% populated with PSIP data), now shows guide info for one of the channels (FOX affiliate) going out to 4:00pm on Wednesday (4/27), 36 hours beyond the other machine.

Looks like the DVR will not display PSIP data for a channel that it previously had a TVGOS lock for, even if the PSIP data extends out further than the stale TVGOS data remaining the local guide memory. We'll see what happens when/if Tuesday morning gets here and KEYE-TVGOS isn't back online yet.

I'll actually be happier if KEYE-TVGOS never comes back!

UPDATE: Checked guide on un-reset DVR again at 9:15pm on 4/24. Now the FOX affiliate data is filled in going forward for 72 hrs. All other channels still show "no info" after 4:00am on 4/26. So looks like the DVR will auto-switch to PSIP data if necessary, but only after considerable time-lag.

All channels populated

Sunday 5/1
CBS - PGA GOLF
NBC Stanley Cup


Fantastic when it works --- nightmare when it doesn't

Hi.

I have The Office recorded every Thursday nights at 9:00 PM PT to 9:30 PM PT (with 5 minutes before and after) on KNBC4. This week's Thursday night is longer (50 minutes). I noticed my timer still shows it as 30 minutes. TV Guides show its 50 minutes. Shouldn't DTV Pal DVR recognize this week's episode change by now? Or do I have to manually delete and readd it and then manually change it back to 30 minutes after this week's?

Thank you in advance.

The Pal is not name based recording so you need to delete the current timer and add a new one for the extended episode.

OK and thanks. Good thing I noticed it.

I agree, "problematic" is the right word.

Your comment about rotating your antenna causing TVG info disruption is very interesting. Over the life of ownership of this CM-7000PAL, I had rotated the antenna many, many times, and AFAIK suffered no ill effects (certainly the clock never became inaccurate). But as of last month when all this mayhem started, it may well be that rotating the antenna here may have been more of a factor than I realized. At one point I thought that moving the beam to raise the signal strength of the Baltimore CBS station was critical in getting a zip code change to Baltimore to take effect. I'm no longer sure of this, nor for that matter, what other odd effects signal strength variations may have caused here.

Even though the clock setting screen always says TV Guide, I'm pretty sure that I'm getting only PSIP data since we no longer ever see advance TV show info. Sometimes 2 days of advance data is displayed, sometimes it's only today's info, but some of this variation probably depends on the exact time of day I check. Regardless, we have not seen 7-8 days of TVG info in a long while (again, if we ever did).

My antenna is an intermediate gain beam. It's probably more gain than needed for watching the Wash DC stations, but I wanted it for watching Baltimore (and to some extent Annapolis). It was installed during the NTSC days and those remote cities, especially Baltimore, were marginal and needed help.

A few days ago I swung the beam back to Wash DC and saw no changes with the CM-7000PAL. Still using the Baltimore zip code, the time remained accurate and the TV Guide listings did NOT improve to include future data. Since I had thought that signal strength might be a factor, I wondered if I'd see any changes, but no.

So though it may have been the wrong time of day, this morning I decided to change the zip code back to Wash DC. This is where I started, this is where things have been since the DVR was purchased -- antenna pointing at Wash DC and using a Wash DC zip code. Almost instantly the clock reverted to being inaccurate, almost 4 minutes fast. Since my clock went from perfect to bad so quickly after the zip code change, it sure looks to me like the local CBS stations (WUSA ch 9) is still faulty.

I intend to keep things stable for a day or two and see if anything changes (especially after this evening). Then maybe I'll try a soft-reset (if that's the proper name for the reset which occurs after pushing the power switch for 4 seconds). Next I suspect I'll need to put the zip code back to Baltimore. Even if I still don't get advance TVG data, I hope I can get the accurate clock back.

If anyone has a better test sequence to suggest at this point, please let me know. For instance, I have never elected the function which returns the box to factory defaults. Is that known to perform magic, and if so, for what circumstances?