Official DVICO TViX M6620N HD (ATSC/QAM) Tuner Topic - Page 61

I've seen this complaint frequently, but the one time I tried playing a .R00 file, it didn't happen to me. When I got to the end of the file, it kept playing, albeit with an "invalid" counter, e.g. if I started playing a file that was 20:00 long, when I got twenty minutes in, the counter started saying it was playing at 20:01 / 20:00, i.e. beyond the end of the file. It didn't stop and force me to load the file again, though. Maybe it was just a fluke.

I got my 6620 a day or 2 before fw 2.1 came out. Been very impressed with it even with all the bugs my gf Hatted it until I started saving her soaps ;-) , I play with it every once in awhile trying to figure new things out, I've had videoredu and agk awhile and love em, i just tried tversity and tvixie, got tvixie figured out but tversity is giving me grief , it will play files stored on comp just fine but when it streams from websites I get no sound just video,It is probably settings or I'm using the wrong version . Just wondering if any one has had this problem and if tversity even still works with tvix? Any help would be appreciated and would save me hours of beating my head against the table with smoke pouring out my poor overloaded brain .
sorry second edit, I was allso wondering if anyone has found what the guide problem is, I've heard it said many times that it only gets what the station sends out, I know for a fact that this is not true, I have several tunner boxes and one of them will have data for at least a week ahead as the 6620 just has it for the day or at best 2
Edited by northernlight11 - 1/31/13 at 6:08pm

I confirm that the SF Bay Area ION station KKPX today is not causing crashing of my M6620N, so it seems that the problem may have been fixed network wide.

Maybe this is a tomato/tomahto situation, but to me in DVR-speak, "buffering" means the show is being recorded to a temporary file on the drive. So, whether I am "really" recording the show or just having it go to the the temporary buffer, no difference in terms of wear and tear on the hard drive. No matter, I agree with you that I'm willing to wear out a hard drive, especially if I get rid of the meatball.

Having said that, I tried your suggested method last night, with a result I'm not 100% satisfied with. Using the program guide, I set 30 Rock and The Office to record, back-to-back. About 15 minutes after 30 Rock had started live, I started watching it by playing back the recording. So far, so good: no meatball! But when The Office got ready to start recording, instead of leaving me alone and recording on the second tuner, it gave me the countdown, then switched to The Office.

As soon as The Recording started, I hit the movie button on the remote to go back to the list of recordings, but I got a red circle/slash telling me I couldn't do that. I waited a minute, and tried again, this time it worked. OK, not so bad. But when I finished 30 Rock and started The Office, at some point near the beginning of The Office, an on-screen "play" icon appeared in the recording. I'm wondering if this was when I re-started the recording of 30 Rock.

Weird, but I can live with it. One think I thought of as a work-around is, instead of using the program guide to set a back-to-back recording, set a manual recording covering the entire time period, i.e., both shows would be combined into one recording. Thoughts, or other solutions?
Edited by Goes to 11 - 2/1/13 at 2:24pm

The countdown is unavoidable; I believe Kei confirmed that it has to to with a limitation of the TViX CPU, and while DVICo was able to enable recording and watching at the same time, there was nothing they could do about making background recordings begin silently. My guess is it has something to do with initializing the tuners, or something. At any rate, when you let it tune away from what you were watching, wait for the meatball to appear on the channel it's about to record. Once the meatball is present, you can open the menu, go to the bookmark tab, and resume the file you were watching.

As for back-to-back recordings, I guess a thorough explanation of this will require a wall of text. The best way to do it depends on your padding settings. With time-based recording, it's common to pad recordings by at least 60 seconds on each end to compensate for clock drift between the DVR and the station, and the TViX has two ways to let you do that. You can set padding manually, e.g. to record from 7:59 - 9:01 instead of from 8:00 - 9:00, or you can use the auto-padding feature and have the TViX append some arbitrary number of seconds to the beginning and end of each file.

If you do the latter, you will have to tweak your timers manually to make them break at the correct time, e.g. if you want to record a show from 8 - 9 and another show from 9 - 10 on the same channel and you have 60 seconds of padding enabled, you would need to set the first show to end at 8:59 (+60s end auto-padding = an end time of 9:00), and you would need to set the second show to start at 9:01 (+60s start auto-padding = a start time of 9:00). If you don't do this, the first timer will take priority over the second, and it will run until its standard end time of 9:01, after which the second timer will kick in. Since there can be up to a 20-second delay between when one timer ends and another begins, you would have a 20-second gap in the opening of your second show.

If you're feeling creative, your stations are punctual, and you really care about having each show saved to a separate file, you can skew the timers a bit to do the transition during the final commercial break of the first show, so you don't miss anything important. The simplest way to avoid these types of conflicts, though, is to do what you have already considered: set a single manual timer to record both shows as one file.

Note that this problem is limited to recording back-to-back shows on the same channel, because the dual tuners are not allowed to both tune to the same channel. Recording back-to-back shows on different channels won't cause this, since the overlap caused by padding will simply cause the TViX to record the second program on tuner 2. Of course, you must also be careful not to let the padding cause other conflicts, e.g. having something like this:

7:59 - 9:01 on channel 2
8:59 - 10:01 on channel 3
8:59 - 10:01 on channel 4

You would need three tuners to record this lineup for the two minutes from 8:59 - 9:01, so the only way to avoid a conflict is to not pad the end of the first program or the beginnings of the second and third ones.

Aleron:

Thanks for confirming what I thought. I do have auto-padding set and assumed that was part of the problem. Even though it shouldn't be: both tuners should be able to independently tune to the same station, and function seamlessly, as if I were recording two different stations, as you explain at the end. (And I understand your point about how three overlapping pads would require three tuners.)

It seems to me that just setting a manual recording for the overall time period is the way to go, rather than timing the last commercial break, etc. Now I just have to get spouse to agree!

Thanks again, Aleron.

I can't much to Aleron's explanation. That 's pretty much it.

The play icon you saw was the tvix switching to the "The Office" file. Your method of recording a one hour block would work but if you have a weak or corrupted signal, it's sometimes better to have separate files.

I use a 15 second pad to avoid the three tuner problem that Aleron describes due to padding. On back to back recording you lose about 1 second but yes, sometimes the beginning few seconds of a show will be at the end of the previous file. If the networks purposely do the one minute shift (end a show at 9:01), you might still have to manually adjust the schedule.
Edited by dornanu - 2/2/13 at 4:56am

Kei,

I am still getting ION crashes here with WPXN (Channel 31, New York City).

The symptoms have changed considerably. I have had the 6620 tuned to WPXN for most of the past 3 days without a crash and I was about to report success. This evening I came in and the set had crashed. I turned it on again and it crashed again after a few seconds, and again, and again. This was just before 7pm. The set has now been on since 7:10pm (2 hours) without crashing. I also found that if I tuned to a different station (WNET), then it wouldn't crash, but back to ION and boom! This was the primary sub (31.1), I didn't try any other sub.

I will keep an eye on it and report back further.

Paul

This crashing is due to PSIP data issues?

Sort of:
http://www.avsforum.com/t/1195962/official-dvico-tvix-m6620n-hd-atsc-qam-tuner-topic/1450_50#post_21823741

Mr.H;
Can we assume you have that sub channel on your affiliate station?
Weird.

Mr. H--

The crashing caused by the ION PSIP data issue does not depend upon your being tuned to one of the ION stations, because it is provoked by the TViX' background scanning of channels for EPG data. If your TViX is only crashing when tuned to ION, you're seeing something different (a new ION "bug"?). I'll have to test that out here as well.

Is anyone using their 6620 to access video from a Pogoplug attached drive either locally or over the net?

I have 6620s at two homes. It would be nice to have access to my movie collection without having to duplicate it in each residence.

Gave up on tversity, although it would be cool I broke down and added a new roku to fill the void. Still no problems here on ion , but I rarely have them (couple times a month) and I watch and record the ion's Alot. Still havnt cracked the tvix open yet, I'm ascared,lol , any one know how much room is in it?? ;-) any modding threads any where on the 6620? Thinking about a front USB port or maybe even a side port near the card slots but like I said I'm ascared to take it apart, soon though. Any 1 ?

Does that mean program listings are immediately available without waiting for the tuner to retrieve them from each individual station like all other tuners they way it is with pay guides?

Sometimes, the guide on the 6620 leaves a lot to be desired, sometimes you have to tune into a channle, then goto the guide ,move to another channle in the guide then back to the channle you want the guide to give you the list for to recieve the listings, not trying to knock the device becouse it is my second fav piece of tech next to my iPad , but in the guide department it really is lacking.

The Guide listings are not "immediately" available, but they are available without needing to tune each station first, because the second tuner is used to scan all the known channels for EPG data and populate the their listings in the background. The process is started when you invoke HDTV mode and takes a few minutes to complete (because of the low data rates in some PSIP streams). In my experience, this works pretty well, especially compared to the single-tuner boxes where you must tune each channel to view its EPG. But it does sometimes seem to get stalled on some channels, as the previous post says. It could have been improved, IMO, by retaining the scan results in memory (such as MyHD does on the PC) so that it wouldn't have to start over completely each time the device is powered on. But it's still the best non-subscription EPG overall that I've seen.

I have a small digatle tunner box call the dtv pal plus( not the dvr one) made by dishnetwork it has a guide close to the dishnetwork guide, but it works of the info the stations send out, it will recieve data for a week in advance for most channles and save them, I have ran into several digatle tunners that will do this but the pal is the only one I own, for some reason the 6620 DOES NOT recieve all the data the stations are sending , and tuning into the channle allways gets me more data on the 6620! Might be the distance but like I said the other box still gets way more data. Before I got my iPad to use as a guide I actually had the second tunner box set up so I could see what was comming on days in advance,
6620 is still tops for features but very frustrating at times
Sorry for all the edits, trying to get this right, the pal plus , loses data after power down, just that it wil save all data when on, where as the 6620 will sometimes loose it, the only reason I mention this is after reading through all the post online for the past year or so on the 6620, every post I see on the guide it is allways blamed on the stations, seems to be a hard line stance EVERY time any one brings up the topic, but it's simply not true
Edited by northernlight11 - 2/3/13 at 11:44am

My long-term period of unsupervised recording seems to have been successful. I set my TViX to make a weekly recording for the last eight weeks and had the clock set to manual mode. The timer fired successfully each week, and my clock only lost about thirty seconds since the middle of December. I'd say that's a pretty good run, considering other DVRs' clocks reportedly gain several seconds on a daily basis and have to be reset at least every week.

I have about 5 in my daily and 15 in my weekly , the 6620 does a great job of timer recordings , it does miss a few every once in awhile, not quite sure why , missed 2 the other day while getting one that started in the middle of another recording. The clock gaining time is one that took me awhile to figure out though. I think I finally read about it on here sometime back

Now that I'm around to supervise it, I have the network time mode selected again. I'll have to enable my other timers day by day this week, since I like to have most of them named from the PSIP data. The only time one of my shows didn't record was because the station lost power and wasn't broadcasting anything.

Sorry, but it simply is true. The M6620 gets its EPG info from the PSIP data stream provided by the broadcasters themselves. In my experience, this info sometimes on some stations stretches out a bit over 24 hours, but usually it's only for the current day. Your Dish device is getting EPG information from another source, one provided by the satellite company, not entirely from the PSIP stream (which I suspect doesn't even exist in your satellite feeds, since it's superseded by the SatCo's separate data stream).

No, the dtvpal plus tuner is STRICKTLY over the air, recieved ALL data from the stations and is not conected to satalite in any way, don't believe it fine , I can't change the hard line stance lol , but for any interested look the box up, maybey if the problem is acknowledged they can find a fix
Tpeterson, I do realize you are one of the smartest people on here,I've read through the post's , I really don't know much about the tvix, but I do know there is more data comming from the stations , this is the modle I'm talking about, NOT the dvr modle http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20080926/dtvpal-plus-launched/
Edited by northernlight11 - 2/4/13 at 11:39am

northernlight11 is correct; there is the Dish DTVPal (a DTV converter box) and the Dish DTVPal DVR (which has its own thread here). The TViX is the only device I have that is capable of displaying extended PSIP guide data, so I can't comment on whether it displays fewer hours of guide data than other boxes: my other devices can only display the current program and the following one.

There is the dtvpal, the dtvpal plus and the dtvpal dvr. The plus modle is the non dvr modle that gets the week length guide. My gf bought 2 of the dtv pal plus boxes with the coupon way back when. Tpeterson , as soon as I get some stuff up and sold on eBay, havnt made anything for a month, lol I would be willing to mail you one, I would like it sent back but I won't count on it,lol I am in a no cash mess right now but everything I make and put up seams to sell so it is a 2 week wait for cash ;-) but I would to have a avs forum "heavy hitter" look into this

I stand corrected , for the first time in about 6 months I hooked up my dtvpal plus, only 2 days of data :-( the 2 stations that were putting out the xtra data are down, I looked into it a bit more http://www.avsforum.com/t/1122914/tvgos-tv-guide-on-screen-devices/1440 it used the tvgos data from CBS and PBS wich apparently the 6620 does not pick up the xtra data, I am very sad to the xtra data is gone but for years it was there and it just went WITHIN THE PAST 3 months!!I could cry http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/27/rovi-gemstar-tv-quide-ota-shutdown/
Edited by northernlight11 - 2/4/13 at 2:30pm

Yes, the threads dedicated to TVGoS-aware DVRs have had a frenzy of activity lately as people scramble to find alternatives. The Dish DTVPal/CM-7000 DVRs use both TVGoS and PSIP and will continue to function after the service ends, but the Sony DHG units become doorstops/paperweights, as they rely solely on TVGoS to acquire their time and date. The smell of either desperation or ingenuity permeates the DHG thread now, as some people are even resorting to making VHS tapes of their analogue TVGoS service so that they can set the time (but not the date) of their DHG DVRs after TVGoS is gone to keep them semi-functional. Thankfully, DVRs like the TViX and CM-7400 that do no use TVGoS are unaffected by the termination of the service.

Lol, I knew the stations were sending more data, looks like the 2 dtvpal plus boxes will make nice gifts,but that's about it.unfortunate becouse it was great having all those xtra days at times, your right there is now soo much more information than the last time I searched for info on this, seems a lot a folks are pretty upset. Maybe someday the stations will get there act together and give us a decent amount of data on there own, but I won't hold my breath due to how new the digatle broadcasts are , but I suspect within the next 5 years?

I'm still very interested in hearing from any1 hat has taken the 6620 apart, or if there are any modding forums for this modle, I've looked online since the latest fw came out and have never found anything on the topic, the 6500 seams to have atleast had a thriving group but it seams it just hasn't developed for the 6620 ( you shoulda seen the terror in the gf's eyes when I mentioned taking the cover off hahahahaha)
Edited by northernlight11 - 2/4/13 at 5:05pm