8300 HD Partial Show Reording

You ran out of Hard Drive space and don't have it set up to autodelete the oldest shows when needed.

The problem could also be from low signal strength. Choppy picture or sound on the recording close to the point where the recording stopped would be an indication of the transmission problem.

Check the "SA 8300 HD Tips & Tricks -- SARA" thread, first post. Scroll down to "Diagnostic Display Data".

Or, just search the thread for "dbmv".

Sometimes this happens to me as well, but more often it splits up a recording into 3 chunks. It always happens with "The Colbert Report": it'll be split into three pieces, each starting where the previous one left off. Funny thing is that one night I noticed the problem around 12:30 so I set the DVR to record the 1:30a repeat, and it split it into 3 chunks as well! I haven't called Comcast yet because this software is so buggy I wouldn't even know where to start with the complaints.

If you look further down the "Recorded Programs" list, do you see the missing 23 minutes in a separate chunk?

This just started happening to me too. I got 9 minutes of a 30 minute show and 55 minutes of a 3 hour show. What's going on???

Is this related somehow to the eSATA drive I just hooked up?

Did you ever figure out what is was? I am experiencing the same thing.

Ever since I got rid of the external eSATA drive, the problem has not recurred.

This has happened to me a few times. I recorded prison break and it only recorded 35 minutes of the show. Then the very next show "24" it recorded only 40 minutes of the show. One weired thing was the status bar was red on the left side and green on the right side. When the show completed the status bar was green on the left side and red on the right. Both shows played perfectly until the cut off so I know its not a signal problem and I know I didn't run out of hard drive space because it did fully record a show later that evening. I'm wondering if my external drive momently lost connection with the box. I only had 2 programs on the drive when this happened. I now have 17 programs on the drive and the problem has not re-occured.

I did a little more investingating.

As we all know the 8300hd stb allows you to record 2 programs while watching 1 pre-recorded program (all ready on the hard drive). With that in mind I started a timed recording and let it record for about 10 minutes. I then started channel surfing and at around the time I started channel surfing the timed recording stoped and I was left with a partial recording. I then started another timed recording on the same channel and just let it finish and it was perfect. I tried this a few times and I found that on certian channels like fox and nbc the recordings would stop prematurly and on other channels like CBS and ABC they would be fine. If you start 2 recordings and start channel surfing this would almost always happen which is to be expected because you can record 2 programs while watching 1 pre-recorded program as mentioned earler. This seems to me to be a software issue with the box. The software should be programmed to warn you that you are recording 2 programs and can not channel surf. Also this should never happen when only one recording is taking place and also needs to be addressed in the box programming.

I would like to suggest to anyone having this problem to confirm my findings using the above process.