Magnavox 537, 535, 533, 515, 513, 2160A, 2160, 2080 & Philips 3576, 3575 - Page 685

Again that's only in the basement, my living room set up is HD.

The good thing about SETV is that the first 11 HD channels listed (locals) can all be found in 720p or 1080i and I only have the classic cable package.



That was my theory from the start, and even though I have never been able to find anything (nor the tech I had look at it) I still think something may had happened to the connector with my initial problems.

Again, thanks to all who have replied.

I took a look inside a Maggie, and the male F-connector part is not removable from the tuner can. Good news is the can has covers on both sides that could be opened for inspection.
That would be really cool if the stray piece of coax wire could be removed to restore function.

How is it possible? I have two 2160A refurb (from J&R) units that have died at possibly the same time. Tried to use the upstairs one and realized the display was dead and no signal to the TV. Unplugging and replugging did nothing. A couple of weeks later I tried the downstairs unit and it's dead as well! I did buy the extended warranty from J&R on both units......guess we'll see how that goes. They are not quite 2 years old.

Sometimes a power failure will make the unit appear dead. The same outage may have killed (temporarily) both of your recorders at the same time. Usually the soft reset will bring them back to life.

I had multiple sequential power outages here day before yesterday. This AM my #2 V2160A had unrecognized front panel display and wouldn't turn on. I found a shot UPS battery, so switched that location to a different UPS. While I was doing that more than a few minutes passed, so the backup in the 2160 expired. When I plugged the 2160 into the replacement UPS, it lit up like it was freshly reset. I set the clock and a timer, and everything seems normal.

Likely all you need to do is what Ken.F and wajo suggested, but adding a UPS would be smart too.

Thanks guys for the quick help. Soft reset fixed both of them! Thanks for the links for the FW update too.

Wow, just read about those FW updates. I'm now completely jealous there is no update for 3576.

(Edited for clarity.)

Where is the update for the 3576?

Update: Though unlikely, you never can tell.

Sorry, I think it's a typo (now == no).

Until I saw Wajo's post, I never assumed Philips had acknowledged the Title Divide issue, or fixed it. I assumed that the later firmware on the DVDR3576 was a minor patch.
If, in fact, it fixes that bug, I am very upset that it was never made available to those of us with DVDR3575s(I have one of those) and early DVDR3576s (mine is Feb 2008).

I have experienced the Title Divide bug on both of my units. I believe that the only was to stay out of trouble is to delete all the pieces of a Divided Title at the same time. Note that Scene Delete is probably just as dangerous as Title Delete if used on a piece of a Divided Title. The killer about this bug is that it is not immediately obvious when it is doing damage to your files.

Last evening I attempted to play a Verbatim +R DL disk that I had made with my Panasonic EH55. The 515 displayed the top menu, but would not play the disk. This was the same behavior that I had with my Sony BluRay disk player. I haven't tried a -R DL disk in my 515 (My Sony BR player will properly play -R DL disks).

Has this been documented and I just missed it?

I've played DVD+R DL discs on my 515 that I burned on my PC. I've even dubbed +R DL titles to the 515 HDD.

Indeed. Sorry, post has been corrected. Sorry about the confusion.

I assume the Magnavox firmware update will not work on the Philips units. Although I can dream.

The problem is not that Philips hasn't acknowledged the title divide problem. The problem is they don't acknowledge that they even made these things.

Does anyone here use a 515 with OTA reception? If so how do you set the clock? I have several 515's and I recently stopped cable and went OTA. The units were all on "Auto" for the clock setting and I have noticed that they are not in sync anymore (differ from one another by about 30 seconds). When I had cable the units were in perfect sync on the clock. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Attached is a pic of manual time set procedure. You may also be able to get your time signal from OTA digital auto, but I have never tried it. Look at page 33 here and try it. I am sure someone will report back here if it can be done.

To be a bit more specific, the machine loads the disk and displays the top menu. When I press play, it plays the first chapter, which in my case, is almost always a ten second title card. After the ten seconds, it returns to the top menu. I have tried skipping to the next chapter, and fast forward, but it presists in going to the top menu after the first chapter. This is the same behavoir I saw with my Sony BluRay player. The disk that would not play on my 515, played just fine on my Samsung BluRay player.

Yes, it was finalized! The MRC setting had no effect on playback of these disks (I tried another +R DL, same result). I don't know how to check the firmware, so I just can't answer that question. I'm sure it's been addressed in this thread many times, I just haven't had a chance to do the search yet.

The answer to the other question really surprised me! I don't use +R disks at all, but I do have a few blanks I picked up for a test a couple of years back, so I made a +R disk and put it in the machine, fully expecting it to work. Surprise! It did NOT work. It had the same result, played the first chapter (title card), then returned to the top menu. I really did not expect that.

Wanting to be thorough, I put in one of my -R DL disks (JVC T-Y) to test if it would work and it played back just fine.

Is it me, or the way that my Panasonic machines make +R disks (they never were really well supported after all)? Ken.F seems to have managed to play these things without incident.

All the disks that I used, that would not play back in my 515, played back fine in my $30 Walmart DVD player. (The HDMI output of the 515 was superior to the output of the cheap Walmart player.)

I use my 513 for OTA, but keep it (and my 515s) set for MANUAL clock setting.

So, you set your clock, as do so many of us (there have been problems with AUTO) by yourself.

Trust me, it's not a back-breaking experience.

Just a quick thought. The 515H (et al.) does a clock set at 12:00 am & pm only. If a valid clock signal is found, the search stops and the clock is set. It will search for only two minutes. If no clock is found, no action is done to the current time.

If I set "auto" I would have a pretty bad clock from PBS or Fox. Many have found Fox to be good. I have my units set to "off" and used a capacitor to help the time as mentioned starting here:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...6#post21617756
You only need to search this thread for clock issues. There are many posts. From an old Funai friend:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...4#post20696614

It would be a great help if the valid clock channel could be displayed with either a SKIP function or the "Display" button.

The firmware page matches this one:

Model: E2S02UD
DTV-S: 0x2B
FE: R60_001_000
BE: HD6A269727V1E
TT: T5011RDU@5

To get auto clock to work with digital only OTA channels, you need to set auto clock to manual and designate a DTV channel number that has a good time signal. My OTA 515 is set to check my DTV FOX channel for updates and has been working perfectly for more than a year.

See the 11:57 procedure to check for a good time signal.

Okay guys. I need some input from our peanut gallery.

My original 515, when tied into the cable box, is working off a COPY-ALL DPX-7000 "filter".

My other 515 has no filter between it and the cable box, and it's time that changed.

I'm thinking more along the lines of one of the Monoprice units, since they apparently preserve widescreen and are more likely to be "future-friendly", in particular the HDMI one.

The only problem I can see with these is that my DVD player is also hooked into the TV involved, and it's connected by way of Component to the TV, and the cable box is feeding into the TV by way of HDMI; I'm pretty sure the cable box has only one HDMI output, and the TV only has one HDMI input.

If I take the HDMI feed and use it for the 515, that leaves the TV with no signal source for High Def. (Again, it's getting the DVD player thru component.)

Is there some type of HDMI signal multiplier that doesn't cost hundreds or thousands of dollars that could take the HDMI feed from the cable box and feed it to both the filter and the TV?

Also, any other comments you might have between the two Monoprice units would be appreciated.


EDIT:
HDMI splitter
http://www.amazon.com/SANOXY-HDMI-Sp...ref=pd_sim_e_1
Looks cheap and there's one or two contradictory feedback comments, but most say it works.
I saw one at Best Buy that cost five times as much. Still have the feeling it might be the one that really works, tho'.

That one is for running a single source on two displays at the same time. Is that what you want?

Monoprice might have what you are looking for.

I'm OTA in central NJ and have used the auto clock setting on manual and NYC's channel 2 with good results for about a year now on my 513 and 515, Before that I used the same setting with Fox's channel 5 which worked well for quite a while and then started to occasionally time shift for about a minute and throw off my timer programs so I gave up on it.

Like I said, the filter and the TV would both need to be getting the HDMI feed, so yeah, "single source, dual display at the same time" would do it.

I'll check out the Monoprice one too. Thanks Ken.

tbal2000, Thank you so much, this is exactly the what I was looking for. I set two of my 515's to DTV 2 and the units now track to within 1 sec of the US government online clock. I will adjust the other ones I have to DTV 2. What is so strange is that I had them set to DTV 13 and they where almost exactly one minute late. This to me says that somehow DTV 13 time signal comes on the trailing edge of the minute setting rather than the leading edge. To make things even more confusing my Pioneer plasma TV runs 10 seconds early (I have no control over its time setting so I have no idea which channel it uses for the setting). Fortunately the TV time setting on the Pioneer is not critical.

I realize that in the scope of the all the problems we have in the world today that a one minute skew in a TV program recording amounts to nothing, however, as a retired scientist I find it pathetic that the TV industry (I mean all parts of it from broadcast to home viewing and all the gear it takes to do this) cannot get a simple thing like a time setting that is accurate to within one second to work flawlessly throughout the industry.

Have you ever checked out this thread?

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...75729&page=532