The Official AVS Dish DTVPal DVR Topic! - Page 523

It's confirmed. TVGOS down in Austin and PSIP sucks. Some stations are going out quite a few hours (CBS, NBC) others only 3 hours (PBS). What a PITA.

Not, what I'm saying is dish in recent lawsuit convinced judge Fogel that reading files from drives with E*FS is in violation of DMCA as the file system is proprietary and made with one purpose: protect data form unauthorized [only dish permitted] access.

Get used to it. Hey, it could be worse if DVR become useless (not even a VCR style) like Sony's. At least with this DVR, we still can manually schedule like a VCR. :P

I'm still having trouble figuring out why not having an extended guide is such a big deal. Does everyone in this topic watch random TV shows on a weekly basis and have no way to know what to watch without a guide? I must be in the minority, as I look at the new crop of shows each season, decide which ones I'm going to follow, and then set recurring timers to catch them each week.

I couldn't care less if stations have > 12 hours of PSIP, because the only thing I need PSIP for is to have named files, which is a convenience I could also technically live without. I guess I don't spend enough time watching TV to care about guides, because the only time I channel surf to see what's on is if I have the flu and am too sick to do anything else.

Programming is unreliable especially with specials and sports events changing times and days. And while PBS has recurring shows, a lot of them are unique and only shown once or twice.

For me, I care not since I can manually look at TV Guides online and manually set my DVR like a VCR like the old days.

 

Yep, I tend to add PBS shows of interest, and weekend sports and network specials.  I also like the guide for a visual check of what's recording, to avoid things like  the single-to-double recording glitch.  For me, it's faster than going online, and anything I add is one click from the guide.

Edited by TalkingRat - 1/18/13 at 8:09pm

How's your clock holding up? Mine went from perfect to about 70s fast when TVGOS disappeared. TVGuide logo has disappeared from guide display, which now shows about 48 hours of data for the FOX affiliate and 12 or fewer hours for all the others. The clock-set screen is still grayed out saying that time has been acquired from TVGuide. I know I could do a factory reset and get this to un-lock but I'll hold off on doing this for a while because a clock that is 1-2 minutes fast is preferable to a perfect clock now that recordings must be scheduled manually (unless they happen to be neat one-hour blocks). With a fast clock you can set your manual timer to start right on the scheduled start time, which will give you a correctly named recording despite the fact that you have a little start-time padding built in due to the fast clock. You need to double up on your end-time padding, but that won't upset the file naming algorithm. I'll keep an eye on the clock and if it remains relatively stable I won't tempt fate by doing a factory reset.

I am still getting TVGOS data but have been reviewing the the PSIP data on the diagnostics screen on a regular basis. The internal clock in MY DTVPal gains 9 seconds a day. This means that any stations (outliers) that are not received within a 24 hour period will now have a +9 second error. My DTVPal appears to calculate time using 11 out of 13 stations, 6 local and 4 outliers that gain 9 seconds a day. Two of the outliers are received when ever it is foggy or rainy and the calculated time error goes down and then starts to creep upwards.

If your locals are transmitting accurate time, a factory reset should make the clock more accurate for a while.

The DVR has a provision to work with Internet content, in reality lack of _basic _ vital underlying every day chore : time, guide.
Could be Ethernet connectet to the box from your router be logged to reveal some such activity? (sure, not guide acquisition, but perhaps time ? hidden use of NTP ?)

Followup: seen in FW the lines:
Edited by P Smith - 1/19/13 at 10:51am

The clock has been fast here too. Fortunately I caught that and added time to the end of Fringe (not that it was worth it . . . pretty b o r i n g zzzzzzz). I have always started timers 3 min early which I'm guessing will no longer be necessary. It's going to be a PITA to have to extend end times manually for every event. Thanks for the heads up about the factory reset. Only 2 stations have current PSIP info this morning. Either it's going to take a while to settle in or non-primetime events are not going to make it into PSIP data.

With TVGOS gone my DVR gains about 7 to 10 seconds per day.
Rather than pad my recording times I just set the clock every other day.

Technically doable and probably easy if you have the two formats but how would we get the stations to put the boxes in their station. Since we can't modify the DVR (illegal to reverse engineer the code and they sure aren't going to release it) one approach would to be generate a PC (I guess you could even use a Mac) app to convert the stream and feed it to a little USB attached RF modulator (sort of a virtual station with nothing but TVGOS) that would insert the stream into the antenna lead. Those little game adapters didn't cost much so if enough were built it might be affordable.
Edited by WillN937 - 1/19/13 at 8:51am

The point is to avoid to make the 100k changes, like FW or manufacturing or buying the "RF modulators" for each DVR ( and dedicated PC for each (!) )...not telling I never saw small inexpensive 8VSB modulators.

I noticed something that I wonder if you did too. I will turn on the PALDVR and go to the guide and see a lot of stations not showing programming. But if I then go to that station and then back to the guide the programming in the guide will now show up. Its as if you have to tune the station first and then the guide will populate.

Indeed. I just figured out this morning that tuning to each individual channel pulls in PSIP. After that all my stations are going out about 12 hrs.. More work for the remote and batteries . . . and me!

Isn't the DVR supposed to do that in the background like it does with TVGOS to get the schedules?

Evidently not. When I looked in the guide this AM only 2 channels were populated. Looked a while later. No change. Then I thought to cycle the live channels and voila. When a station is tuned, the info appears in the guide immediately.

Mine works that way. I think the DTVPal can get confused though, and "forget" that it has more information to show than it is showing. A few minutes ago, I was looking at the guide and there was only one channel showing PSIP data, but then I just went to the menu, and back to the guide and then all the channels showed data. I have also seen a description of a TV show suddenly disappear, and be replaced with "No Information". The DTVPal has a lot of bugs in it.

Mark

perhaps the TVGOS outage do require restore to default, to tell the FW: "do scanning all channels by yourself, dude - don't use TVGOS!"

Interesting. What happens when you rescan from scratch? Does it find those data?

I agree that more tests are in order but I'm going to see how it settles in for a few days before I start mucking around with it.

Yes it does, but not constantly - just now & then. I don't know how often, but it does.
Of course it does it right away if you tune to all the channels.

You are using only PSIP data as I recall now. Over the past several years I have noticed the drop out of program description when the TVGOS is working. It seems to me it has been mostly with movies on stations off the major networks and it does not come back by tuning the station in question. WIth TVGOS working did the Pal unit still populate some of the guide with PSIP? That seems like it would be a recipe for disaster but maybe that is what actually happens and would possibly explain why there was an intermitent loss of information. I suppose that if the PSIP information changes from time to time depending on each stations broadcast some data may be lost and then magically reappear at a later time when they broadcast the entire PSIP schedule again.

I'm PSIP only now, and mine sometimes does this. No big deal.

I've always had a "hybrid" guide. There were only 4 stations that the DTVPal would "allow" to have TVGOS data (I use the word allow, because the same stations that did not have TVGOS data on the DTVPal were completely filled with TVGOS data on my Sony DHG). Most of my channels were PSIP only, even when I had TVGOS enabled. I don't remember if I still had TVGOS enabled when I saw the disappearing show descriptions, or not. I guess it is possible that it only happens when TVGOS is enabled though.

Mark

I had forgotten, but a couple of weeks ago, someone on the CM-7000 thread was having the same problem. I don't think he found a solution though.

Mark

Getting a named recording is no big deal; if you set a manual timer and had to give initial padding, you can always rename the stored recording after it's done.  For me, the big advantage of event timers over manual timers is that event timers on the same channel can overlap, in case the transition between shows -- and the ten- to fifteen-second dropout if they abut without overlapping -- doesn't occur exactly when the DVR expects, and with no TVGOS clock setting, the likelihood increases.

I keep forgetting to see how my own DTVPal's clock is doing now that TVGOS in Chicago is history.

You may need to take action to get the Pal to realize TVGoS is gone. Try going to the screen to set the time. If the clock is grayed out, you need to do this.

First try deleting the channel that used to send TVGoS (usually your CBS station; sometimes PBS), setting your zip code to 00000, and rebooting. That should unlock the clock. If TVGoS is gone, you can add back the station you deleted and it should stay unlocked. (If TVGoS isn't gone, your Pal will gray out the clock again as soon as it detects TVGoS, even if the zip code is 00000).

If that doesn't work, a factory defaults reset should do the trick. Once the clock is unlocked and the TV Guide logo is gone from the guide, the Pal should start building the guide by scanning all your channels.

I don't know how often the Pal scans and which tuner it scans with, though. I'd guess that it uses the same tuner used for live viewing, so it'll only scan if it's in standby and not recording two channels at once. If I'm right, you probably need to set your Pal to turn itself off after a few hours of inactivity, so it can get the chance to scan and update the guide. And I'd hope that when those conditions are met, it scans every few hours to keep the guide reasonably complete.

But if it only scans at a certain time of day (say, overnight) and your stations are only sending out, say, 12 hours of EPG, you may have little if any guide data when prime time comes around. If this is a problem, you should be able to force a channel scan just before prime time by scheduling an auto-update (which forces a reboot). I haven't tried this, though.