The Official AVS Dish DTVPal DVR Topic! - Page 505

Those people must be using a truly tiny antenna design to not receive channel 11. I can pick up the high VHF + UHF stations, but my elements are too small to get low VHFstations. Thankfully my market doesn't have any.

Clock & Guide issues

After reading & then rereading the last several weeks of posts, I have a headache.

I lost TVGOs on Nov 1 (my clock & guide were perfect).

I have 2 units & both act identical to each other & both are F08.
After several weeks I noticed both clocks were fast, so I found Date/Time screen & set both the clocks.
Both clocks are gaining about 10 seconds every day. I changed Zip codes to 00000 but they still gain time.

Questions
How do I change if I want the "manual clock setting" over "PSIP average time" & vise versa?

Is there a magic button that I can push that will fill in ALL of my stations' PSIP info?
I tried holding the power button & doing a reboot with loading guide screen, but that didn't even fill in all of the PSIP info.
If I tune to each station it fills in all of the info, but this isn't very convenient.

Thx,
Jim

It will periodically (I can't say how often during a day) use an available tuner to scan all the stations' PSIP data and use it to build the guide. The only time it won't do this is if the unit is using both tuners for other stations, either recording or watching. Not every station will provide PSIP guide data even though the FCC requires it.

You don't.

That appears to be true. Without TVGOS, recordings will start early, start late, or start right on time - it's a crap shoot every time.

Uh, can't you just do a manual record and tell it to record five minutes before and after those times like an old school VCR?

Yup, that's how I do it (though I go 1 minute, 2 max. before and after). FYI, my clock is still fine (no TVGOS, clocked greyed out but still says acquired by TVGuide, no factory reset) and my PISP values show five are +/-10, three are +/-10 to 20, and seven are a bit more (-21, -31, -85, -29, +48, +26, +39), with outliers of -980, +233, +667, and +799. So it looks like they're generally drifting higher/more positive.

Just curious why are you guys not on Rovi's facebook page complaining to them. They read and answer posts there. Your voice will be heard there. Problem is only a few of us bothered to post on the Rovi Facebook page. If 25 to 100 posted there they might try to help us. Posting here does no good. Posting there might help. It might not ,but it is worth the try. it is free. It is realtime.
Edited by keyboard21 - 11/25/12 at 11:59am

I don't use Facebook.

Nor TVGOS. "soon"

After April it is gone. Unless we try to show them it is wrong. I do not think we will win, but at lease we can try.

Posted there and got the standard canned reply.....what's the use?

Maybe if 25 to 100 of us posted there we might get noticed. Why is everyone just giving up without really trying?
Edited by keyboard21 - 11/25/12 at 2:22pm

I'm not up to going into the details now, but that's a solution only when a manual timer will do the job.  Sometimes an event timer is preferable or necessary.

You can set five minutes before and after as the default padding for event timers, of course.

The difficulty in either case is hoping that the DVR's clock will stay within five minutes of the station's clock.

Not enough tuners to start early and end late for everything I record.
Edited by 1HD_addict - 11/25/12 at 6:58pm

The fact that your clock is greyed out means your time is still being acquired from TVGOS.

But I no longer have the TVGOS logo on the guide screen. And it looks like I spoke a little too soon--I must have been on the cusp of a shift when I checked earlier this afternoon, because now the clock is about 1, 1.5 minutes fast. I'm going to hold off on a factory reset for now and watch over it to see what happens; I'll keep you guys updated.

Just to verify, the decimal numbers on the left (next to those hex TSIDs on the right) are the values we see for the PSIP Ident numbers on the diagnostic screen, correct? (It may be an immediately obvious thing to some, but it wasn't made completely clear to me.) I'm trying to figure out what stations are providing me with PSIP times, and if this is the case I get programming for only one of those 19 listed stations, four are in Ohio, two are in Indiana, one is in Wisconsin, and one is in Massachusetts. I'm in the middle of Michigan.

 

Clocks running fast solved in the Magnavox HDD/DVD recorder thread by rkg22, who posted a fix with a capacitor added to the clock crystal, as described here.

 

He gets drift down to ~1-min./year. Seems pretty simple for a techie. He adds more detail four posts down.

An observation today how my two DTVPals in the same house on the same antenna reacted today to KTVT-11 CBS turning off their VHF transmitter RF 11 and finally going UHF RF 19 only. They have been simulcasting on both VHF and UHF since July 2009.

One DTVPal was already set up to the UHF 19 RF channel. Did not have to do anything. Tune to Ch 11 and there it is. Tune to Ch 70 where it had assigned the other Ch 11 and nothing, no signal. So I will delete that one manually.

The second DTVPal tuned to Ch 11 had no signal. It was using the VHF RF 11 for Ch 11. The UHF was assigned Ch 70.

The two DVRs had the RF channels for Ch 11 reversed! Weird. I thought it started scanning low VHF, then Hi VHF, then UHF.

Will be interesting to see if TVGOS follows along.

My Pal seems to lost the use of one of it's tuners. I can no longer record two shows or watch one live while recording another.

Have you tried a Factory Defaults reset?

Station ID's can be found here: http://www.rabbitears.info/oddsandends.php?request=tsid

- Ident: 1819=0x2203 (1819 is the decimal TSID for WFMY the part after the equals is not the hex equivalent. Maybe a DTVPal status code?)

Time 20:05:26 17/11/2012 (+266) (time 3:05:26 EST, 17-NOV-2012, +266 second deviation from the DTVPal calculated time)

I have 12 elements in my list. It includes ALL my locals plus several stations in surrounding DMA's

Currently all my locals are within 30 seconds of NIST time, but most of the non-received stations are several minutes off NIST time. The DTVPal's calculated PSIP time is 61 seconds off NIST time.

I have no idea what the "SAVE:" and "NEXT:" lines signify.

Does you answer mean that there is no way to set a manual clock? Time will always come from PSIP info?

The clock in this DVR is not the typical automomous internal clock controlled only by the output of a crystal. The DVR is running internal software (F208 firmware) that is forcably altering the clock, therefore interventions that speed up or slow down the crystal will not address the problem.

Nobody (outside of Echostar) knows exactly how the internal clock control algorithm works, but this much seems evident:

** All comments below pertain ONLY to enviroments that do NOT have a TVGOS datastream being broadcast on ANY channel (or to DVRs that have been reset to factory defaults and had zipcode 00000 input during initial setup)

You can set the clock manually, but there is no way to stop the "weighted average PSIP algorithm" (let's call it WAPA) from altering your clock setting as it sees fit.

So for the DVR to remain useful after April we need one of the following conditions to be true:

1) The WAPA is able to smooth out the PSIP clocks in your area well enough that you can reliably record programs without resorting to unmanagably large padding times.

2) Failing #1, you are able to identify the egregiously bad PSIP clocks in your area and either get the station to fix it, or get the DVR to ignore it. That last part is really the only open question remaining: " Is it possible to force the DVR to ignore a bad PSIP data?"

I speculate that the DVR adds PSIP elements to the WAPA algorithm whenever it acquires any new station, even those spurious weak stations that only appear intermittently. It then updates each of those PSIP elements periodically from the broadcast stream. In the case of a spurious station that was auto-added many months ago (and then deleted from the channel lineup by the annoyed owner), I think the PSIP element remains in the WAPA list, that's the only way I can explain the 28 PSIP elements shown on my DVRs despite the channel list only containing 8 channels. If that's true it means the DVR may be maintaining some very "stale" PSIP clocks based solely on its internal crystal. Over many months without any broadcast updates, the PSIP clock elements of those spurious weak channels might drift so much that the WAPA is overwhelmed.

So the post-TVGOS world may involve two steps on our part if we see the clock drift:

1) Check PSIP times of the channels in your lineup using the DVR diag screen and contact the Tech Dir of any station with a bad clock.

2) Do a factory reset to purge out any "stale" PSIP elements that may be overwhelming the WAPA.

please post their facebook page

I assume it is http://www.facebook.com/RoviCorp ...

I have had no problems with the quality of the PSIP derived time in my area.

My theory is that once the DVR has acquired TVGOS time the ability to set the time manually is grayed out but if there is no signal after that, the time source is the internal clock which will drift with time. If you can't set the time because it is grayed out but the time is off your only choice is to do a reset to defaults. If the DVR still thinks it is using TVGOS time I would guess it is telling the truth and your station is not sending good time as many of us have experienced in which case you will need to choose a different ZIPCODE (which may be 00000).

Yes, Correct

I wasn't referring to the "0x2203" part from the diagnotics screen but the digital codes on the left and the hex equivalents on the right on the RabbitEars.Info page to which you linked. Sorry that wasn't clearer.

Here's what I have:
1527 (-26) WLAJ Lansing, MI 53 (have seen it at our house before: definitely on the living room TV, pretty sure on my TV, maybe on the DVR, but it very, very rarely comes in at my end of the signal)
2255 (-24) WEWS Cleveland, OH 5 (not my 5--that's WNEM out of Bay City)
4025 (-32) WBSF Bay City, MI 46 (this is my CW)
2253 (+6) WKYC Cleveland, OH 3 (not my 3, which rarely ever comes in--that's WWMT out of Kalamazoo)
1465 (-95) WOTV Battle Creek, MI 41 (does come in, just got added with a channel scan a few days ago)
1459 (-963) WBKB Alpena, MI 11 (have never received it)
1529 (+5) WCMW Manistee, MI 21 (have never received it)
2309 (+250) WTVG Toledo, OH 13 (not my 13, which I don't think every comes in--that's WZZM out of Grand Rapids)
1509 (-28) WXMI Grand Rapids, MI 17 (hasn't come in since the digital transition)
3181 (+19) WBAY Green Bay, WI 2 (not my closest 2, which doesn't come in--that's WJBK out of Detroit)
1105 (-334) WPTA Fort Wayne, IN 21 (not my closest 21, which doesn't come in--that's WCMW out of Manistee)
1483 (+65) WDIV Detroit, MI 4 (have never received it)
1107 (+43) WISE Fort Wayne, IN 33 (seems vaguely familiar but can't confirm I have never received it--maybe before the transition?--WOHO out of Holland is my closer 33, but it doesn't come in)
1485 (+56) WXYZ Detroit, MI 7 (another that seems vaguely familiar but I can't be sure; doesn't come in)
1489 (+20) WKBD Detroit, MI 50 (I think I know of this station through cable; doesn't come in)
1515 (+684) WHTV Jackson, MI 18 (have never received it)
1461 (+816) WPXD Ann Arbor, MI 31 (I might be confusing this and 33 as far as what seems familiar; doesn't come in)
2313 (+20) WGTE Toledo, OH 30 (have never received it)
1535 (+35) WADL Mount Clemens, MI 38 (have never received it)

It's possible a few of those have been picked up when conditions were just right, but for the most part the ones I've never received I've never seen crop up as added stations. What I fail to get is why more of the stations I DO receive don't appear in the list, nor why there are 19 in the list but the diagnostics screen shows the number of elements as 36.
A dumb question, but how did you check this (knowing the DTVPal's PSIP time to see a 61 second difference part, not finding NIST time)?