The Official AVS Dish DTVPal DVR Topic! - Page 44

If you are looking for something to pull in OTA HD and want to DVR it, $300 isn't much to pay. It will cost more to build a HTPC and take much more time to set up.

I too am hoping someone comes out with the DVR of my dreams (just like this one, but with a rectangular case, Blu-Ray burner, easily added hard drives and a Panasonic badge). And yes, I know such a unit would cost a fortune. It would be worth it.

Meanwhile, I'm a happy owner of a DTVPal DVR that has TVGOS data, no reboots and no lockups. The "jollies per dollar" are stratospheric.

That's how I feel about it. I've thought about building an HTPC, but the costs involved, and getting the hardware right - to choosing to pay for Windows and Sage vs. free Linux and Myth plus headaches galore: when I heard of the this OTA DVR, I jumped at it.

I had a Dish 508 PVR and it did lockup every now and again, reboot spontaneously, overheated, and used a time based recording scheme. But even with the weekly errors, I still liked it. And they finally upgraded the recording to name based.

I ordered the DTVPal DVR earlier this week. Hopefully they'll be upgrading this as well. But if not, I'm sure it will beat anything out there now in price to feature ratio.

My Pal DVR is on order and hasn't arrived yet, but I do have a Sony Bravia TV that gets TVGOS from KYW broadcasting from Roxborough. The TVGOS is working fine.

We dream alike.

Fantastic. Once you get yours, I'll be waiting to hear if there are any problems. Your box will be coming in the second wave, so let's hope the production run is a little better.

I hope you're right, but based on its reputation Dish is probably more likely to have shifted all production to the factory producing the highest proportion of defective units in order to save money.

The have - it's called TiVo.

And...how much do you have to pay them each month for that ?

Well…two full weeks into heavy use with no lockups/reboots/etc. ended last night. I had a program recording from a DVR timer and switched to that channel…while watching as it was still recording (about three minutes in) the DVR locked up. I had to do a cold boot by unplugging, waiting, plugging back in.

While this event does bother me, I am not yet ready to scream “bloody Dish has done it to me again!”

I also have a Magnavox ZC352MW8 that has a digital tuner and gives PSIP EPG data onscreen. I have had this unit for quite some time and it has a very annoying habit of occasionally needing to go through the initial setup routine when you first turn it on (bring it out of standby). It doesn’t happen all the time and I always thought it was some sort of power surge issue even though I never had any of my other equipment suffer any signs of a power anomaly when it does this. Plus, when I set up the DVR I had it (the Magnavox) unplugged for several hours and it did not need to do the setup bit even after that.
Right after the DVR locked up I tried the Magnavox and, sure enough, it needed to do the initial setup yet again. I think they are connected and I think the connection is the PSIP EPG data stream and some sort of corruption therein. Much like the theory being talked about here, but I believe it is in the PSIP stream.
Maybe some software/hardware issue with an encoder sending malformed bits.

So I searched the web for PSIP EPG data corruption and found the ATSC Recommended Practice: Transport Stream Verification document (here) dated 9 May 2007 (is this still the standard used?). Now I will not pretend I understood a lot of what I read, but I did get the gist of it and the information on page 14 under the heading “TIMING AND BUFFER ERRORS” was very interesting indeed.

I will continue to watch for any more lockups and then check that against the Magnavox’s annoying habit.
Does anyone else have another device with a digital tuner and PSIP EPG data that does something odd at times?

***I did try to duplicate the lockup with the same set of variables but it did not lockup***

Analog or digital ?

Digital.

...but what I saw was NOT a lockup. What happened in both cases is that one show was recording on a timer and I switched to that channel to watch it during the recording. While I was watching, a SECOND recording started. When that happened, the screen went blank and an icon shown in the top right corner for a few seconds which read "REC" with two red dots above it, indicating two recordings were ongoing. One would expect that this would not make the screen blank, since I was watching one of the two channels being recorded. The obvious conclusion is that even though I was watching the same show that was being recorded, in reality, I was still using the OTHER tuner. In other words, both tuners must have been tuned to the same channel. When the second recording started, my tuner was taken away and given to the DVR. Subsequently I was able to open the guide and watch one of the two channels or watch a previously recorded show.

It's a minor bug which isn't much of a bother, but I thought I would report it here. Hopefully Dish can easily clean that up.

Hi,

I got one of these before Xmas. I have not opened it and I'd like to return it. Of course there is no number on the web site. Can someone give me a # so I can try to return it. Much abliged...

This was definitely a lockup...no response to any key on the remote.
I even waited 15 minutes to see if it would reboot on its own.

The website makes a point to say All sales are final with its Sales Disclosure. Line 4. Also the first post in this thread distinguishes it with bold blue letters You'll probably have better luck getting rid of it on eBay...

Nothing - with the lifetime service. And before you say anything - you get what you pay for. But I shouldn't have to reiterate that at this point.

There are two other things that might be "contributors" to the symptoms in the Magnavox you describe, and they're easily checked and eliminated:

1. DST is ON in the auto-clock menu.... this can cause all sorts of unexpected problems that defy theoretical explanation.
2. OSD Language hasn't been set (to English)... this is one cause of messages to set up, etc.

Originally Posted by jlkane View Post
getting the bogus "The selected event is already recording" error (A674) -- if two conditions are true:
- the channel to be scheduled supplies PSIP data only
AND
- the time to be scheduled is beyond the window covered by the PSIP data

I got this message yesterday for the first time. I have only PSIP. I wanted to change "judge Judy" from m-f to just friday,since the daily show is back. I deleted the JJ schedule and then tried a manual recording and got the message, nothing else is in this slot a 3:30 PM I also tried some other manuals and got the same message. Today when JJ was in the PSIP guide I just clicked on it and set the parameters and it worked fine. I have put in many other manuals otside the guide times and they did take. I may try again to put in some manual timer just for a test tonight.

Does the box still work with the antenna unplugged (like can you still watch a show you previously recorded)? Everyone seems to suspect a lot of the problems may be related to the TVGOS signal. So if the people experiencing reboots try watching/ff/rew etc with no antenna and STILL get reboots then we can rule out the signal. If the reboots stop then we can say it is the signal.
Come on people, figure out how to stop these reboots so I can go buy one of the damn things

Who's lifetime? Yours or theirs?

I did not mean to imply that what you saw was NOT a lockup. I'm sorry if that is the impression I gave.

Back in the day when Dish released the 5xx and then the 721 series of DVR-PVR units they had lots of teething??? problems much like the DTVPal DVR is having now.

Many of us Dish paying beta testers discovered that by plugging these units into a modest UPS (NOT a surge-spike protector) we eliminated some of the nagging problems.

Not trying to get these things to run long enough during a power failure to record a movie but to overcome an iffy (marginal) power supply in the chassis.

Smoothing out and cleaning up the line AC eliminated random reboots, failed timer recordings, lockups, lost sat, and other teething problems.

Just a thought and maybe worth a try?

My DVRs are ALWAYS on UPS. Takes too long for the DBS one to come back up if it takes a power hit. Figured it couldn't hurt on this one either.

The unit's - if it outlasts yours or theirs.

I suspect the problem lies in how timers are handled in memory when they are deleted. Yesterday, I saw an almost identical case when I deleted a daily timer because I wanted to replace it with an M-F, a Saturday weekly and a Sunday weekly, since the show on Sunday was a different length. I deleted the daily successfully. I added the M-F successfully. I added the Saturday Weekly successfully. However, when I tried to add the Sunday, I got the message you mentioned. So I deleted the M-F, and added the Sunday successfully. Finally, I tried to add the M-F, which failed. Finally, I moved from Thursday to Monday in the schedule and THEN I was finally able to add the M-F successfully. (Of course, this last option is likely unavailable to you if you have only PSIP data.)

My first thought was that M-F conflicts with Sunday somehow, but I was unable to reproduce that. So I decided that it must be related to deleting. I suppose this theory can be easily tested...

The 508 has had it problems - I avoided the big ones by having updates set to ask for permission (until they decided to force an update). And yes, it does need to be rebooted every now and then (I'd say an average of every 2 or 3 weeks).

The current release (one old since it's asking to update again) has a problem where if I don't wake it from sleep mode every day, it fails to record anything that night.

I also had something interesting happen the other night. I was watching a half hour show that was still recording. I had hit pause, got busy then went to bed. The next day, it was still recording, up to 21+ hours (at least I had close to 38 hours left before it started so it didn't delete anything - of course it didn't record any other scheduled timers). It apparently didn't stop recording at the end of the event when I put it in pause. (I'll have to remember not to do that again.)

Our 625 has been much more reliable, it may have needed rebooted once or twice in the two years we've had it (due to a lockout). Though just recently it's decided to not actually record anything for an event (says "Done" in the schedule history and not "Skipped", but nothing is in My Recordings).

Just remember, it's their (Tivo's) lifetime, not yours. Given that they have been operating in the red for some time now, how long do you really have before it's simply a door stop?

Since several people had reported that they could not get the TVGOS Digital to Analog conversion to work with their DRVPals I thought I would see if I could get it to work with my DVR even though I knew it would not be a useful feature with a dual tuner DVR. I couldn't. I contacted TV Guide to see if they had any ideas or special chants to make it work. This is the response I received.

Unfortunately at this time we are not passing the data in the format that the DTVPAL is looking for. At this point I do not have date as to when we will start providing the data in that format. Also to let you know, with the DTVPAL when we start broadcasting the format that it is looking for, if you set the DTVPAL to pass the TVGOS data to your DMR-EH85, the DVR function will no longer work on the DTVPAL.