The Official AVS Dish DTVPal DVR Topic! - Page 502

Or perhaps they, like HBO, just really, really don't want to deal with end users and billing and customer service and all the additional layers of headache that come with doing what you're talking about?

For those who are adamant that the DTVPal DVR will no longer meet your needs without a TVGOS program guide, I'm wondering what you will be going to instead. Personally I will be satisfied with the PSIP guide and the PSIP clock set as long as the clock is stable and relatively accurate (+/- 1 minute).

If I had to pick a replacement "off-the-shelf" product I would opt for a TiVo with lifetime subscription. A brand-new TiVo Premiere (75 HD hours) for OTA is $150 plus $500 for the lifetime subscription. Of course those are the full retail prices on the TiVo website so I'm sure you can do better if you shop around or wait for a promotion from TiVo. I don't think anyone will argue that TiVo has an excellent extended program guide with useful features like the Season Pass. TiVo is also a "mainstream" product much more so than the DTVPal DVR or the CM-7400 DVR so I would expect much more support and service/repair options to be available if needed.

I don't think I would opt for the Channel Master CM-7400 at all. There are many concerns with it if you read the AVS thread and if you want an extended program guide it is going to cost you $50 per year. With the price of a new unit running at $380 to $400 and adding in the $50 annual subscription fee for the extended guide, I don't think there is good value there compared to the TiVo. In addition is there any guarantee that the extended program guide will be available indefinitely (for $50 or for any price)? If the guide goes away you will be in the same situation that you are in with the DTVPal DVR right now-PSIP only.

I'll see how it goes with relying on PSIP.  Most of the stations I record from do provide a few hours’ info or more, and there are other sources for looking up what will be on the air.

My concern is the clock and how accurate it will be when my unit switches to relying on PSIP and taking a weighted average (nobody seems to know how it decides how much weight to assign to each station's signal) of the PSIP clocks of the stations, which can be far off the mark.  Since the clock cannot be set manually and there will never be a firmware update to add such a function, that may render the DTVPal DVR unusable.  It's not as if the clock error were constant and one could just adjust one's timer entries for it.

Buying a TiVo or such is something I want to avoid.  The antenna reception in the room where the DVR is is not so great, and what I'd really need to squeeze into my budget are a second outdoor antenna and the money to pay someone to install it.  Dying from a fall off the roof would make the expense of the new antenna rather pointless.

Ditto.

That is not true. The only time you cannot set the clock manually is when the DVR locks on to a TVGOS signal.
When TVGOS is no more, that won't happen, so the clock will be able to be set manually.

I thought the clock would be set by PSID when TVGOS is unavailable.

Then what's this talk been about the unit's using a weighted average of the available stations’ PSIP clocks?

I never heard of such a thing. Please post instructions on how to set clock when TVGOS is gone. There is no procedure. It is set by PSIP.

PSmith please answer this. I think Chuck is mistaken

Yes, the clock is set using PSIP data when there is no TVGOS,
but you can also set it manually whenever you like as long as there's no TVGOS.
TVGOS locks the clock so you cannot set it.
PSIP does NOT lock the clock, so you can still set it manually.

Ditto, that is my understanding as well. What I don't know for sure is how persistent your manually set clock will be if there is bad PSIP clock data being broadcast in your area. Will your accurate, manually set clock drift due to the bad data? I don't think we know yet. Not enough experience with these DVRs in non-TVGOS, bad-PSIP environments. Time will tell...

As a further explanation here's the actual Dish F208 firmware release notes that were sent to me by Dish in July 2009.

F208 Release Notes
The following issues have been addressed and are fixed in this release:
• Stop PSIP time sources adjusting time when TVGOS time has been acquired. This is the behavior where the time is seen to jump back and forth when TVGOS is the time source.
• Improved handling for inaccurate PSIP time sources, using a weighted mean calculation to select the correct time. Also added guards to handle daylight savings transitions being signalled incorrectly.
• Initial time is now acquired from all available PSIP time sources during installation. Once (if) TVGOS time is acquired, this will be used as the time source.
• Added secondary splash screen to notify user that unit is Entering Standby. This avoids the confusion for some after powering up a unit that was in standby before power cycling, this screen only appears in this situation.
• Improved USB support – should now support all removable USB sticks.
• Daily Schedule now lists repeating events correctly when the event name changes (Dynamically picks the event name for that day rather than copies the initial timer name)
• Failed recordings now get reported correctly (with reason) rather than being reported as complete.
• Removed a blank screen instance after stopping recording – only occurred when 2 Record Entire Event recordings were in progress.
• Correctly display start time, end time and duration for Record Entire Event recordings in menus.
• Removed long delay in audio synchronization after trick modes and pause.
• In the Guide, the long No Information periods have been segmented into individual 1 hour periods, allowing recordings to be easily scheduled for times where program information does not yet exist.
• Fixed an issue where corrupt timers were stopping the unit initializing. This should avoid the situation where the unit stops on the …Loading Please Wait… splash screen.
• Added option to toggle the tracker bar off/on (using the CANCEL key) when using trick modes, or paused.
• Added page forward/back in Program Guide using FWD and BACK keys.
• 30sec skip occasionally jumps to end of program (was fixed in F207).

Ok fine. Could you please post the procedure on how to set the clock manually

thanks

Menu, Setup, System Setup, Installation, Set Date Time.
If the unit is receiving TVGOS the set time will be greyed out.
If it has not found TVGOS you can set the time.

I've never used TVGOS and the clock setting was always greyed out. You can un-grey it by setting your zip code to 00000. Once un-greyed, you can then set it manually.

Back when I was considering buying one of these in 2009, I got the impression that you could set the clock manually as long as TVGOS was not present as people are indicating; however, I also remember reading that the manual time you select won't "stick" if PSIP is available. If you adjust the clock manually, the DVR still compares its clock against PSIP times. If they don't match, the DVR will override your manual time setting with what PSIP thinks is the current time.

As a result, the only way for the DTVPal to have a truly manual clock setting is if you're in an area with no TVGOS and no PSIP on any channel. Someone who has already lost TVGOS should test this: set the clock to some random time that is completely wrong and then see if it gets changed to the PSIP time after using the unit for a day or two.

I receive PSIP. I also set my clock manually - and it sticks. I repeat - this works if you set ZipCpde to 00000.

Can you still get TVshow information in the guide with the zip 00000

thanks

Yes. The PSIP data is part of the signal coming in from your antenna. The only effect of setting your Zipcode to 00000 is it allows manual edit of Time.

Has this been confirmed? This is the first I am hearing of this. Will be great if I can get it to work

What he says is correct. I have mentioned several times that you can prevent TVGOS from setting the time by leaving the zipcode at 00000 after a factory defaults, of course TVGOS will no longer be received either. However, if your clock setting screen is currently grayed out, then setting the zip code to 00000 seems to have no effect. You probably will have to do a factory defaults to allow the editing.

Mark

Let me clarify this ZipCode issue.

Chuck44 wrote:
Yes, the clock is set using PSIP data when there is no TVGOS,
but you can also set it manually whenever you like as long as there's no TVGOS.
TVGOS locks the clock so you cannot set it.
PSIP does NOT lock the clock, so you can still set it manually.

I wrote that I use PSIP, not TVGOS, and my clock was greyed out and could not be edited.

These two comments seem to contradict each other. But perhaps not. I see the 'TV Guide' icon on my system, I just never went in and activated it. I rely on PSIP instead. But just having the icon there may be why I couldn't edit the clock, even tho the icon was never activated. Mark's comments said that setting ZipCode to 00000 overwrites this and allows you to edit the clock - which is what I do.

So, based on Chuck44's comments, if there is no TV Guide icon on your system, then the clock should not be greyed out, and you should be able to edit it without having to set the ZipCode to 00000. If someone out there is on a system that doesn't have the TV Guide icon, they can confirm this.

If you want to check your local broadcasters on their PSIP time - hookup one of the convertor boxes and do a swing through your received channels and check what time your box is saying. Depending on your locations / stations - it may or may not be pretty steady.. Mine (in the Raleigh NC market) is - my stations are all pretty much in sync on time.

I think DB100 and keyboard21 are conflating certain aspects of TVGOS and PSIP derived guides. They work completely differently:

TVGOS data is sent out OTA by a single (or sometimes 2) broadcasters in each DMA, however that digital datastream contains guide info for dozens of DMAs. The only way your DVR knows how to parse out the relevant guide info for your particular DMA (and discard the rest) is by referencing the zipcode that you enter. That's why the zipcode 00000 trick reportedly works to disable the TVGOS lock on the clock.

PSIP data is sent out by every broadcaster in each DMA and that PSIP datastream contains data only for that particular station. So the DVR has nothing to parse, it simply presents all the PSIP guide data that it receives in the guide display. Therefore it has no need of any zipcode info in order to process PSIP data. Therefore, setting the zipcode to 00000 (or any other value for that matter) makes no difference if you are not receiving the TVGOS datastream.

For people who want to spend time experimenting with the DVR behavior in a PSIP-only environment before their DMA actually pulls the plug on TVGOS, there are two options:

1) Use the zipcode 00000 trick; I haven't used this so I can't vouch for it but others have. In this case the DVR is still receiving the TVGOS stream but is discarding all of the guide info due to the bogus zipcode, evidently it also discards the TVGOS timestamps and releases the "greyed out" lock on the manual time set option.

2) Delete the TVGOS provider channel from your channel list. I have used this trick back when we were debugging the original clock-skew issue identified in Austin a couple of years ago and I consider this to be the more foolproof option because in this case the DVR is no longer receiving the TVGOS stream at all and therefore cannot possibly be using it to influence the clock, regardless of zipcode setting.

So in conclusion discussions of using the zipcode 00000 trick to disable PSIP control of the clock are incorrect, it has no effect at all. The question that remains is:

"In a DMA with no TVGOS supplier (most reliably simulated by deleting the TVGOS channel and resetting the DVR) how will the DVR clock behave if there are bad PSIP clocks being transmitted."

Comments to date (about whether the manual clock set drifts or is "sticky") are not useful because they do not include data on the accuracy of all the PSIP clocks that the DVR is receiving. There is a diag screen somewhere within the DVR menu options that will display a list of stats on all the broadcasters in your area including how far each stations PSIP clock is from the weighted mean (I forgot where this screen is, can someone remind me please). Alternatively you could look at each PSIP clock directly using TSREADER on a PC with an ATSC tuner.

Personally, I'm like Trip, I'm perfectly happy to continue using the DVR in old-fashioned date-time-channel-duration (VCR mode) once TVGOS goes away in Austin. Most of my timers are recurring anyway, and I'll just browse TITANTV once every week or so to make sure I'm not missing anything new. The only thing that would push me into TiVO-land is if the clock becomes unreliable. IIRC when I saw that PSIP summary diag screen back in 2010 nearly all stations were within 5s of the weighted mean and the worst one or two stations were still less than 30s off, so the max 5 min default timer padding should cover just about everyone I would think. We'll see...

I have had no PSIP clock problems with F208 and the averaging scheme they implemented and as stated when there is no TVGOS you can set the clock manually. My issue, as most people here, with PSIP is that the stations send anywhere from a few hours to at most 3 days. Obviously they are catering to TVs or believe that more than 8 hours will break some CECBs. WDTN here has sent 3 days for over a year so I assume they are not getting many complaints about the impact on CECBs or TVs.

If you set the zip to 00000 it will not find a TVGOS signal for that area so it will use PSIP. You always get PSIP since it is required. Any station that does not display a full weeks guide info is based on PSIP. F208 uses a weighted average of times and it is unlikely that one station will pull the time off by that much. You can see the times each station is sending on the diagnostics pages but someone else will have to tell you how to read the info since I don't know. FYI turning TVGOS OFF on the guide page only affects the display source, if TVGOS is available it will still try to use if for time because they assumed that was the best source.

The system uses TVGOS by default. If you have the red icon on your guide screen, any data over a few days out is from TVGOS.

Actually you can probably just flip through the channels on your TV (NOT the DVR, the TV).

Are you sure about that? It removes it from the guide but I think it remembers that is where the guide info is and still uses it. For example have you ever had the DVR pop up a box saying it has found a new service. It is constantly tuning/scanning when the box is in standby and I believe it loads TVGOS.

As a matter fact I have a strange situation now. I did a reset to factory defaults and then set the zipcode to a adjacent area. My DVR indicates that it is getting time from TVGOS but I don't get any guide info. I don't know if the time is coming from another area or they are sending time but no guide which seems strange since as far as I know it is all part of the same stream.

From this P Smith message:

That is how you see the different PSIP clocks for the different stations. Also the time is GMT format, and the date is in day/month/year format.

Mark