The Official AVS Dish DTVPal DVR Topic! - Page 506

I think we may have stumbled upon some useful information here. Like you I have only 19 station IDs in my list and I have the number of elements listed as 36. Also I have a lot of my local stations missing from the list. I'm thinking that 19 entries in the list is the maximum number allowed by the F208 firmware programmers to obtain the "weighted mean" of PSIP times.

The other interesting thing that I noticed in my list is that of the 19 station IDs in the list only the last 4 in the list are local stations in my area that I receive all of the time. The 15 station IDs above those 4 are all from outside of my area and I only receive them if the weather conditions are just right (especially in the warm and humid summer months when ducting occurs). I am located in the Providence, Rhode Island/New Bedford, Massachusetts DMA but I have stations in my list from Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New York and New Jersey. Some of those stations are hundreds of miles away. The farthest one out is WRAZ channel 50 in Raleigh, North Carolina with an ID of 1855! That station also has the most inaccurate time at +725.

Because only the last 4 stations in my list are locals that I receive all of the time I'm thinking that the list contains the 19 last added/received stations. As more and more out-of-area stations are received the more of your original 19 local stations are pushed out of the list (from your initial channel scan). The stations at the top of the page are the last added and the stations at the bottom of the page are the oldest in the list. It appears that the 19 stations are in chronological order based on when they were added/received.

I guess this means that you would have to routinely do a restore to factory defaults if you wanted to purge your list of all of these out-of-area stations and only have PSIP data for your local stations. I'm wondering if you live close to a time zone boundary line and occasionally pick up stations in another time zone when the weather conditions are right, if that would wreak havoc with your DVR's PSIP time calculations.

I imagine the PSIP time is provided as UTC, hence the reason you must manually enter your timezone and DST flag during initial setup. Lots of people live near timezone/DST borders and picking up stations from both sides would not be an abnormal situation.

If you page down to one of the last diagnostic screens you will see a heading "Local Time"

Local channel PSIP times verified using a CECB

I can confirm that with one exception my locals are at he bottom of the list in basically reverse RF channel order.

Has anyone actually confirmed this? I've done several Factory Defaults resets over the years but never thought to check this.

I haven't done it myself (yet) but I ASSUME all of your stored PSIP time data would be wiped clean during a restore to factory defaults and would be re-acquired during your initial channel scan following the restore. I am also going on the assumption that only 19 channels have their PSIP times stored/used by the DVR for time calculation. From what I have observed it is the latest 19 channels to be received by your DVR that are used and it doesn't matter if they are in your current channel list or not. New out-of-area stations that are received for a very short period of time seem to wipe out the older stations in your list in chronological order (last station in your list is the next station out of your list). On my list of 19 stations I only have 4 stations at the very bottom of my list that are stations that I receive all of the time. The other 15 stations are ones that I have received at some point since my last restore to factory defaults. I'm in Massachusetts and one of the stations in my PSIP time list is from Raleigh, North Carolina! (See my post above for further details.)

Before doing a 'Factory Defaults', I would try a couple of things first.

1) Try the soft reset where you hold the power switch for 10 seconds, and then see if maybe the older PSIP clocks are cleared out.

2) Go into the setup, and do a channel scan. That might clear out all the clock data, and recreate it.

I guess I'm lucky. Looking at my clock information the greatest error is +2 seconds. Most of the clocks are +1 second, and a couple are 0 seconds. None of them are slow. This problem doesn't seem to be an issue where I live.

Mark

question , how do i look at the clocks?

Thanks for the suggestions. I did find out some very useful information as a result. The first thing I tried was to go in and use "Find New Channels" to see if that would have any effect on the PSIP time list. It did not. The next thing I tried was to go through the entire installation setup wizard (channel scan, enter time zone, enter zip code, etc.) and that did the trick! After that was completed all of the data in my PSIP time list was fresh and was only from my local stations that I had just received in my setup channel scan.

From the new information in my PSIP time list I can confirm that only 19 stations are stored in that list. I have a total of 20 different television stations that I can receive (40 with all of the sub-channels counted) and only 19 appear in the list. I THINK it may store the first 19 stations based on RF channel number (in ascending order) as the only station that is missing from my PSIP time list is RF channel 51 which is the highest RF channel that I receive. As far as their actual placement in the displayed PSIP time list displayed on your screen, I see no pattern there. The order is not based on RF channel number, virtual channel number, digital TSID number, DMA.....

The good news is that 14 out of my 19 local stations displayed on my PSIP time screen are within 10 seconds of "actual time" with a range of -10 to +9. I have two extreme outliers but they are both from non-mainstream television networks. One is station WYDN (TSID 1395) which is virtual channel 48 in Worcester, MA and they are an affiliate of the Daystar (Christian) Television Network. Their time is at -17404 which is 290 minutes slow! The other extreme outlier is station WWDP (TSID 1383) which is virtual channel 46 in Norwell, MA and they are an affiliate of the ShopNBC Television Network. Their time is at +971 which is over 16 minutes fast.

So the lessons learned here are that we can purge and refresh our PSIP time list by simply going through a new setup wizard. We do not have to do a full restore to factory defaults. It has also been confirmed that only 19 stations are displayed in your PSIP time list so if you have 19 or fewer stations (not sub-channels) in your area that you can receive, all of your stations will be in your list. If you have more than 19 stations it appears that the stations with the highest RF channel numbers (after you reach a total of 19 stations in your list) are not displayed.

Menu 3-2-6 then page up/page down in firmware F208. It's not available in the original firmware F201.

Prior to the 2009 transition a lot of folks were duped into thinking they needed new "HD" or "digital" antennas to receive OTA digital stations. (Public education about the digital transition was abysmal.) Many of the antennas sold to meet this "need" were just UHF loops or bow-ties dressed up to look "high-tech" (and overpriced to match the look). When KTVT tried to move back to channel 11 most of these folks couldn't get their 23 kW signal with those "HD" antennas, so KTVT scrambled back to UHF. Now the VHF signal is, after a long transition period, finally gone, causing early headaches for TVGOS devices like the DTVPal.

To be fair, the headaches will only get worse next April when TVGOS is gone for good, but some of our DFW kin are getting their first taste of what's to come.

Interesting... So what did the DTVPal calculate as the local time?

I don't think it calculated anything. Because I only went through the setup/installation wizard and never did a full restore to factory defaults it never lost TVGOS time. In the time box it said that the time had been acquired from TV Guide when I went through the wizard. I don't believe that would have been the case if I had done a full restore. So I guess those figures that I saw for each station's PSIP time were in comparison to TVGOS time which is spot-on in my area.

An interesting development this morning is that the one missing station from my PSIP time list earlier this morning (RF channel 51) has now appeared at the top of my PSIP time list and the station that was at the very bottom of my list earlier this morning is gone. The confusing thing is that earlier this morning my list said 19 elements but now it says 20 elements. So maybe it stores more than 19 stations and uses more than 19 stations to do its calculations but only displays 19 on your screen.

I also contacted the engineering departments of three major outlier stations this morning about their incorrect PSIP times. Two I had to leave messages with but one of those called me back (from the network headquarters!) within a half hour and assured me it would be corrected. The third station that I talked with live when I called also assured me that they would look at their PSIP stream and correct it. To tell you the truth I got the impression from the two people I spoke with that they were dumbfounded that anyone paid attention to their PSIP time or used it for anything.

I hate to say it but most people in America that don't use OTA have NO clue there are people who still use their antennas. In fact most people think they can't use their antenna's anymore. I talked to many people over the past couple of years complaining about their cable or satellite service and I tell them I have no problems because I use an antenna and they look at me like I am from another planet. They tell me they didn't know antennas still work. Also proves how dumb most people are and how they have been sold on the lie that they can only get TV with something other than an antenna.

I remember when the update came out. There was talk about PSIP time and it was said that. The DTVPAL now would throw out the times that were way off. Leaving the times that were closer to each other and then taking an average of those times


PS Please do not forget to make a comment on Rovi's facebook page about Rovi discontinuing TVGOS. There are more and more people leaving messages. We need more. Please do your part and help. It will take just a few minutes of your time and the cost is FREE

Yes . . . the squeaky wheel and all . . . I added a comment several days ago and have been following the others. I was wondering why folks whose devices are now totally unusable aren't getting Sony to go to bat for them? Did anybody ever go knock on Rovi's door in person?

I know that Psmith's name was talked about. He said he was 10 min away.

When I go to diagnostics, the screen with all the PSIP info, we are discussing and then page down to the last few screens I find a line entry that is titled "LOCAL TIME" or something like that. The data to the right of that title is the current date and local time for my location. That title is repeated on more that one screen. This morning the calculated time had jumped from +67 seconds to +91 seconds.

Question for you recorders: Is there a way to tell DTV Pal DVR to autodelete the oldest recordings when needed for more free disk spaces? I noticed I still had very old recordings from Feburary 2012 and it was deleting my newer ones.

What I do is "Protect" the recordings (go to Menu 4-1) that I want to save or haven't watched yet and leave the other recordings in unprotected mode. It won't delete anything that is protected. I've found that once this DVR gets below 5 hours of HD recording time left it may start deleting previous recordings. I found this out the hard way when I lost some old, unprotected recordings.

I haven't seen it delete my newest/latest recordings yet. It is more of the older ones (not the oldest), but then I don't care for those. I do use protect for the old ones I do care for, but those are very rare. I just wanted this DVR to delete the oldest ones and not the newer ones. Basically, delete based on age when need more free disk spaces. It seems like this DVR randomly deletes unprotected recordings that it wants to nuke?
Edited by phildaant - 11/29/12 at 11:36am

I don't have anything that says LOCAL TIME in any of my 19 station entries on my screen. The time that is displayed for each entry on my screen is the time of that station and then it has the + or - amount in comparison to my TVGOS time (an assumption on my part but a pretty good one I think).

Are you still getting TVGOS time or are you PSIP only right now? Also do you have less than 19 station entries in your list? Maybe if either of those is true you may be getting this additional LOCAL TIME line entry on your screen that I am not getting with TVGOS or with my screen totally full with 19 stations.

With your calculated time jumping this morning from +67 to +91 seconds, how accurate is the clock in your DVR right now in comparison to the "real/actual" time obtained from a known accurate source? Are you padding your recordings for 1-2 minutes to compensate?

I get this all the time, people think that when we transitioned to digital the free OTA programming ceased to exist. I have one friend who didn't watch TV for two years after he got rid of cable because he didn't know it was possible to watch with an antenna. He was just streaming on his Roku and watching DVDs until I clued him in, he was thrilled to be watching the NFL again. My next door neighbor moved in about a year ago and doesn't have cable or satellite. He was just watching Blu-rays on his two huge Mitsubishi DLPs. He mentioned one day that he really missed watching football and other things on TV but, being a single father or four little girls, cable was just not in the budget. I gave him a $20 antenna I had in my garage and he's thrilled to be getting all our local channels. The cable and satellite companies did a good job of brainwashing everyone during the transition, it's very sad.

That's sad. We need to remind them that OTA is still around and possible for most people.

I have 12 elements - I posted pictures of the first two screens earlier. I have been always been TVGOS, so I the clock does not pose any problems (yet) further, I have not done any kind of factory reset in over 2 years.

Pictures tonight.

That must be the difference. My screen is already maxed out with 19 entries and doesn't have room for anything else like your LOCAL TIME line item.

See attached taken about an hour ago 5:40 EST


DSC00034.JPG 34k .JPG file
DSC00035.JPG 42k .JPG file
Edited by Pete-N2 - 11/29/12 at 4:17pm

My two DTVPal DVRs survived OK, followed the demise of RF11 without losing TVGOS. I figured it would go away about the same time. But it's still working, I have listings out to next Thursday. I had to do a little maintenance when they turned off RF11, delete dead Ch 11 in memory on one of the 'Pals and do an add new channels scan to let it find the RF19 signal, the other 'Pal already set itself up on RF19.

According to TMZ.com PSmith was last seem entering the ROVI Building and hasn't been seen or heard from since!

URL(s)? [grin]

I can confirm that I don't have that LOCAL item in any of my 19 entries in my PSIP time list.