Samsung 3090/3270 HD-DVR Thread - Page 2

Your's is the first complaint I have seen here about the ends of shows being regularly cut off. How much is cut off... seconds? minutes? I doubt that its a Navigator issue... have you compared the clock display on the box with a known accurate time source? Maybe TW's master clock (that provides time info to the boxes) at the headend is off. It shouldn't be... but could be. Or does it happen with only one particular network?... maybe they have clock issues if they are the only one.

I just got one of these new 3090 boxes. I've had some progress with getting eSATA to work, but it isn't recording to the external drive yet.

Basically, it took a few reboots, but now the eSATA drive shows up, and the % full is calculating using the total amount. The problem, though, is that when it gets up to 14 or 15% full (basically the internal drive's share of the total), it starts deleting shows, rather than tapping into the remaining 85% capacity available through the external drive.

Both the Samsung and ODN status screens acknowledge the presence of the drive, so it's annoying that it won't record to it.

my ODN version is 3.1.0_11.

Thanks!

Any suggestions from anyone who has gotten it to work.

Galla, where are you located??

i'm late to the party again.
anyway, i had this problem on my MDN 8300hd before the last update. every recording would cut off a minute or 2 from the end. if i had back to back recordings i'd have to watch the beginning of the second program to see the end of the first. it still does it but not as often as before the update.
i believe i remember some discussion about this in the navigator thread but it was quite a while ago.
occasionally my sammy cuts off the end of programs too.
the clock display on both boxes is and has always been within a few seconds of my auto time sensing alarm clock. the minute changes within a few seconds of each other. my alarm clock is exact to the second with this site
http://www.time.gov/timezone.cgi?Eastern/d/-5/java
which gets its time from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the U. S. Naval Observatory.

Then the next questions to be answered are...

• When does the recording process end relative to the scheduled end-time?
  
  If the recording ends when the clock ticks over to the scheduled end-time, then there is is no Navigator fault... if the recording ends early relative to the clock, then maybe there is.
  
  I suspect that there may be an unavoidable delay of a second or two when all tuners are in use and a tuner has to change channels and acquire the new program stream.
• When does the show end, relative to the scheduled end-time?
  
  If the show ends late relative to the scheduled end-time, then there is not much that TW or Navigator can do about it.

good question. i unfortunately have never been able to watch the show while recording when this happened to see exactly what is happening. i'll try and catch it sometime but it doesnt happen very frequently any more.

i particularly remember it happening when bones and house were back to back. it would cut off the end of bones. then when i watched house id get the end of bones and the commercials between shows before house started . then sometimes house would be cut off sometimes not.
same thing for sara conners and prison break.
most recently i've seen ice road truckers, and deadliest catch get cut off at the end but not enough to miss the actual show. it just cuts off previews of the next show while credits are running.

I lost the last few seconds of Ice Road Truckers last night (previews of next show)... but like you was not watching to see whether it was the recording or the program that was off.

New York City (Queens)

Any one experienced this problem with ODN. (based on other posts, I assume I have ODN, even though it says Mystro during bootup).

-KG

I also have the same issue. My DVR got to 10% and then started deleting programs. It reads the eSATA drive, it knows it's there, but it won't record to it.

When I get home later, I am going to try going into the HDD Diag and see if mounting the drive will have any effect.

I also have a 3090. I am located in Orlando FL

It's very well known that all 3.x versions of ODN have major issues with using an external drive. Complicating things, we do have a some saying "it works" but I have yet to see any of those convince me the "it REALLY works." They could very well see what galla saw... it LOOKS like it may work, but actually doesn't.

Give that a whirl... it didn't work for me. I even had success on mounting. I also tried to reformat using the diagnostics. Same thing.. it shows up everywhere... just doesn't record to it.

I don't know if this could be correct, but a tech told me that the Samsung 3090 uses a different software...i think Linux, and that hard drives don't have Linux...he thought if I formatted a hard drive with Linux it could work.
Does this make any sense? I am not great with technical stuff.
After reading several posts, I got the SA 8300 again, but I couldn't get it to format a hard drive either. I have Time Warner Cable, Milwaukee, WI.
I just want to find a way to record more than 15 hours of HD with Time Warner...

What about opening the case and swapping out the drive in there with a larger one?

Without blowing anything up, woudl there be a way to do that? I'm sure it's more complicated because you would have to image the new drive identical to the original one.

-KG

That's about to where I am now. I am letting record some stuff to see how far it gets before it starts deleting. Maybe it's fixed. However, I doubt it.

This one looks a little easier to swap drives out. Doesn't seem to have any funny "VOID" tape anywhere. I will give it a few more hours before I swap drives. Does the HDD hold anything else besides saved shows?

What size is your drive? I have a 1TB seagate in a eSATA drivebay.

I had a 160GB seagate in an external enclosure running fine on my 8300HD for a long time. That box crapped out finally and I took the opportuinity to upgrade my external storage, so I bought a 640GB Caviar Green. They gave me an 8300HDC which I could never get to work with the external drive. That box was defective and only lasted me a couple months... Now I have the 3090 and was hoping to make use of the 640GB drive I bought!

HDD transplant complete, boot now.

Fingers crossed everyone.

Well, so far so good.

Box took longer than normal to boot. Had to format the new drive. After the format it went to the Mystro count down. After a few recordings it seems to be alright. True test is after a few days.

Nice work! What drive did you install... the 1TB Seagate?

Did you just literally unhook the old drive, plug in the new drive and power up the DVR?

I was thinking we would need clone the drive to get the OS or what ever else the box would expect to be there.

Do tell! This is good news!

-KG

That's the drive I put in.


Quick and dirty KG, just unhooked the 160GB and hooked my drive up. No cloning, no nothing.

It just took a while for the initial boot. It had the Samsung boot screen, then said it needed to format the drive. Screen goes blank, but the front of the box says "Hdd" while the drive formats. After that you get the Mystro boot count down.

That's all she wrote.

I knew the HDD wouldn't have any other info because the Diag for the box let's you reformat the built in drive.

So far so good. I have about 50 hours recording in the next week. Let's see how it works out.

No Joy.

Box went Tango Uniform (Tits Up) this morning. Unresponsive.

Had to reboot box with cord unplug. Booted back fine. Lost all saved shows. Don't know what the deal is.

Going to try to troubleshoot more when I get home.

That's a set-back. Any luck on the troubleshoot?

PLEASE keep posting here... this is a subject I am most interested in.

Did you just pop in the new drive straight from buying it? My experience over many years is that "raw" drives sometimes come unformatted (and by that I mean high level, not low level) or more typically FAT (which variant depending on drive size).

So the first issue would be for the box to format the drive, probably from what passes for a BIOS or on-box firmware. Then the head end HAS to download everything.. which involves more than just the IPG software.

Gotta say I am skeptical... it's quite easy for them to prevent this from happening and certainly is in 150% their self-interest to NOT allow it to happen. Otherwise, a lot of guys may be doing it and cause a lot of additional expense on TWCs part. Many years ago, Compaq did this... you could not swap a larger drive except to buy one from Compaq that cost about twice as much... even though it may have been the exact same mechanism.

Of course, it COULD be that the Sammie is so new they have locked it up as much as SA boxes. Or your division isn't as hard nosed as others may be.

Bachetta,

Are you on Brighthouse? I've been thinking about switching from my 8300hdc to the 3090. What are your thoughts as it seems you did the same switch? Any issues with HDMI?

No luck on trouble shooting. I am quite pissed. Had to put the stock drive back in.


The drive was not raw. It's been formatted a few times in various SA boxes.

To the best of my knowledge, the headend did not D/L anything into the box. Just a quick format then up and running. Unless you mean the Guide data.


I am infact with Brighthouse.

I have not had any issues with the HDMI, but I will say, for now, the Sammie box can be customized a lot. There's an option for Dolby Digital (AC3) over HDMI that wasn't supported on the 8300hdc. The Sammie box also boots a lot faster from a cold boot than any other SA I have ever had.

Just remember the password for all the Sammie boxes is the model number.

So when you go into the diagnostics and it asks for a password, just type 3090 (for us) and you're in. That's where you can mount the eSATA drive, change AC3 over HDMI and stuff.




Right now I am a little deflated that this won't work. The only I can think of is that we need to tell the box to keep all episodes and force it to go to the eSATA drive.

I dunno, this whole setup worked fine on my SA 8300hdc, but then BH did some update that FUBARed everything. That's why I got the 3090.

I might be showing my noob status here but what is difference between the Dolby Digital (AC3) option versus what was offered from the HDC over hdmi?

I was wondering if I should set it to AC3? I use the HDMI only for picture to my TV. For audo, I just use a Left & Right RCA wire from the back of my Samsung DVR to my Stereo.
Is AC3 the best setting?

Thanks

Makes no difference in that situation.

Bachetta, just curious... Have you plugged the drive up to a computer to see how much space is taken up? In my just 24 hours of having this box and trying to study up on it, I swear I saw that it had a max upgrade of 320gb on the HD. Maybe (just a theory) it hit the 320gb limit and coughed.

I know it sounds stupid, but you never know.

Question: Does the DVR allow you to map program guide data for a channel (and therefore set up recordings) to specific QAM frequencies, without having a CableCARD?