The Official AVS Dish DTVPal DVR Topic! - Page 424

Originally Posted by P Smith

NP for all counts, PM when you'll be ready.

Originally Posted by jrpastore

So it looks like KVUE shut off their ROVI encoder some time before 4:00am this past Thursday (5/5). That's over 72 hours ago which is longer than the typical intermittent outages that I have seen. Hopefully the long-awaited fix for the beleaguered Austin TVGOS market will not prove to be so short-lived. Anyone hear anything from KVUE?

Originally Posted by J-D-H

Assuming this is a hard drive based recorder with ATSC tuner, I wasn't aware of this alternative.

Originally Posted by frank70

Apple TV for $99 has neither a hard drive nor an ATSC tuner. As such, it is no competition for the DTVPal DVR in it's current incarnation. That's not to say that the DTVPal DVR couldn't have implemented some video-on-demand applications in its firmware, but it may not have been designed with enough throughput or memory to support that.

Originally Posted by AV Empiricist

I just checked the Pal's clock and it is 3 seconds ahead. I'm impressed that my radio controlled clock is within a second of the NIST TIME Widget. My TV Guide has always been fine. It's displaying listings through next Saturday morning.

It's disappointing that MPT, 22-x & 67-x are PSIP only. And by what logic is 60-x getting a full listing and its DC sister, 66-x is not?

Don't get too down about the TV Guide. Now that the DC timestamps appear to be straightened out, you should be able to restore it without adverse consequences.

The TV Guide has been the Achilles Heel of all the OTA HD dvrs. I gave up on the LG about January of 2008 because the Guide rendered the device unusable. My Sony is sitting unplugged since getting the PAL because I got tired of fussing with its Guide. I don't miss the small non-replaceable drives. But, I do miss the chronologically sorted groups of recordings. And, each episode was titled. If you group the PAL's recordings, they seem to be listed alphabetically according to the episode description. Duh, who thought of that?

Originally Posted by P Smith

It is designed for VOD and Pay-TV support; it has smart card + internet + reserved space on HDD.

Originally Posted by dkreichen1968

It was also designed to handle MPEG-4, which is another indication that the original plan for the PAL DVR was much bigger than the current reality.

Originally Posted by J-D-H

After becoming tired of waiting for a reply from WUSA, I went ahead and employed the Factory Defaults menu option yesterday. With things as they originally were (antenna & zip code = Wash DC), it was interesting to watch the progression.

Immediately after the factory defaults reset sequence finished, the clock was accurate (virtually perfect), but the time setting screen was NOT grayed out and it didn't indicate TV Guide as the setting source. Also the guide listings only displayed 1 day of TV show information, so it seems all this was due solely to PSIP. Then after 2 hours I rechecked and found the clock was only slightly off (within 10 sec), but now the clock setting source indicated TV Guide, and the guide listings had grown slightly to show approx. 1 1/2 days of TV show data. Then this morning, about 12 hours later, the clock was still accurate, but wonder of wonders, the TV Guide listings were now populated out to approx. 1 week (as had been predicted)! So as of now it looks like everything is back to normal and the CM-7000 here is operating as it was when all this started weeks ago.

Now it'll be interesting to watch what happens. Is this happy situation permanent, or a temporary glitch where things just happened to align properly for a short while? I sure hope the former!!! Another hope is that the tech director at WUSA will decide to make a statement about how he sees things.

Regardless, hopefully everyone who's been having this trouble in the Wash DC area now sees their problem fixed....

Originally Posted by AV Empiricist

My CM-PAL has been tracking at 3 seconds ahead since I toggled the zips a couple days ago. Interestingly, PAL #1 is also 3 seconds ahead, while Pal #2 is within a second of NIST.

One issue that might be worth noting: My PAL #2 has gotten hung-up twice. The 1st time it froze, the red & green LEDs were lit. The 2nd time, several months ago, it was just unresponsive. Both issues were resolved with a hard reboot. (My other 2 PALs have never frozen). On a hunch, I checked the update option. Sure enough, I had forgotten to disable it. I'm suspicious that forcing the PAL on an endless quest for a non-existent firmware update with the subsequent reboots, may be bad for its emotional well-being. Anyway, why ask for trouble?

I see three likely sources of your previous TV Guide issues: A power outage; the 1am update reboots, or badly timed reception interference. I know that after my 7:10pm resets the entire DC Guide filled in sometime between 12:45am and 2:04am so I'm not liking the timing of that 1am update.

Originally Posted by P Smith

Please, a source of the info - support MPEG-4 ? Are you referring to STi7109 capabilities ? I'm not sure you could say same for the FW ...

Originally Posted by Gary S
This seems to indicate MPEG-4...
http://www.echostar.com/DTVPalDVR/DTVPal_DVR.pdf

Originally Posted by ss_sea_ya

As I have seen before, I guess a factory reset may help, but no guarantee's on the guide restore. But worth a try a some point. I think I just made sure mine was left tuned to ch 9 to at least make it "look at" the data. Eventually it came back.

I still have mine pointed to Bal, I'll give it a week or so, and if no one reports back with problems, I'll switch it back to DC.

Glad it looks like everything is back to normal!

Originally Posted by goddi1

Greetings,
I had sent an email to Rovi to see what might be causing the incorrect time with my DTVPal. I am in the Wash. DC area. Here is what I just got today:
------------------
Hello Gary,

A few weeks back some during some testing, the clock in our digital hardware for your area was set ahead by 5 minutes. This has now been set back to the correct GMT time.

Has your timing issue been corrected? If it has not, please try resetting your DTV pal and let us know if it sets up again to the correct time.

Thank you,
Rovi CE Tech Support

Originally Posted by goddi1

Greetings,
I had sent an email to Rovi to see what might be causing the incorrect time with my DTVPal. I am in the Wash. DC area. Here is what I just got today:
------------------
Hello Gary,

A few weeks back some during some testing, the clock in our digital hardware for your area was set ahead by 5 minutes. This has now been set back to the correct GMT time.

Has your timing issue been corrected? If it has not, please try resetting your DTV pal and let us know if it sets up again to the correct time.

Thank you,
Rovi CE Tech Support

Originally Posted by goddi1

Greetings,
I had sent an email to Rovi to see what might be causing the incorrect time with my DTVPal. I am in the Wash. DC area. Here is what I just got today:
------------------
Hello Gary,

A few weeks back some during some testing, the clock in our digital hardware for your area was set ahead by 5 minutes. This has now been set back to the correct GMT time.

Has your timing issue been corrected? If it has not, please try resetting your DTV pal and let us know if it sets up again to the correct time.

Thank you,
Rovi CE Tech Support

Originally Posted by J-D-H

If this was all that happened, it fills in a huge information hole. However I can't help but wonder if more was going on.

Maybe a few users reported seeing close to a 5 minute error on occasion, but in general the number hopped around in the range of 2-3 minutes. Also sometimes it was fast, sometimes slow. Meanwhile some saw no error at all and their clocks remained accurate throughout this period.

Could it be that what the Rovi guy said was actually the case, but that this Rovi problem coupled with some oddity in the DVR firmware caused the clock to do what we saw?

Originally Posted by J-D-H

Oh yes, a side issue I meant to ask you earlier.... Do you have your three DVR in separate rooms? If not, have you found that by some magic the remote controls don't interfere? I ask because we've thought of getting another "PAL", wish to have the two in the same room, but figured the remotes would fight.

Originally Posted by J-D-H

Oh yes, a side issue I meant to ask you earlier.... Do you have your three DVR in separate rooms? If not, have you found that by some magic the remote controls don't interfere? I ask because we've thought of getting another "PAL", wish to have the two in the same room, but figured the remotes would fight.

Originally Posted by J-D-H

Oh yes, a side issue I meant to ask you earlier.... Do you have your three DVR in separate rooms? If not, have you found that by some magic the remote controls don't interfere? I ask because we've thought of getting another "PAL", wish to have the two in the same room, but figured the remotes would fight.

Originally Posted by LenL

You can do what I do. I wrapped a 5x5 piece of card board in foil and bend it into an L so it stands up. Then I simply move it from one dvr to the other blocking the IR receiver depending on which DVR I want to use.

The alternative is to program your DVR and you can find explanations on how to do that on this forum. I was going to try that but since I have been doing the foil trick and I am so used to it I have not bothered to program the remote.

Originally Posted by gary-in-dc

I did have to do a reset...cold reboot with power plug to see the fix. Before that and after the fix in DC took place, my PAL DVR went from being ahead to being behind in clock accuracy. I didn't know of the fix until today, so I did a cold reboot and time is accurate (for the last 6 hrs anyway - hope it will stay!)

Originally Posted by gary-in-dc

Thursday, May 12 - 3:15pm
Well it lasted until around 2pm today...back to 5 mins slow in DC! ...Anyone else in DC with skewed time again or is it just that I don't have one of those magical DVRs'? If others in DC are OK, maybe I need to do a factory reset.