Hi!

I am quite annoyed tonight.. Surface Recorded the first 38 minutes and then stopped. That's bad enough but hey.. maybe a network problem. Thankfully I have timeshifting and I'll record later.

I was recording CSI Miami on CTV at 10am. At 10:14 I went to the recording, rewound to the beginning and then started watching. At about 15 minutes into the recording it just froze. The recording stopped. The PVR Shows the show being recorded but if I go past the point where it stopped recording I am flipped over to live. If I back up I go to the spot the recording stopped. Forward takes me live. Weird!

I am going to phone Rogers but it sure would be nice to hear if others had the same issue tonight at the same time.

..Tom

CSI Miami recorded fine for me tonight. We started watching 21 minutes in, and made it to the end with a minute to spare...so in general we were always watching what was recorded.

The odd time I've had a recording that is so badly messed up that it basically freezes my PVR for 30 seconds or so, then kicks me out of the recording. But that's probably happened only 3 or 4 times since I got the PVR.

Tom, try a hard reboot of the STB by unplugging it for a minute or so, then letting it reboot, then giving it about 1/2 hour to download any information. The reboot often solves these sorts of issues, but not always.

Also, check your signal strength. Often programmes are not recorded if the signal strength drops below a certain level, or if the channel has a dropout. See the Digital Home FAQ "Tips for SA STBs".

Hi 57!

I did the hard reboot.. in fact I had done one six or seven hours earlier that day. I called Rogers and the support person was very good at going through the details the PVR sent them.. i.e. signal strength, etc and everything was reading fine. There appeared to be no problem with the unit, the signal strength or anything else she could see. Unfortunately she had no sugestions other than to replace the unit (which I want to avoid unless this becomes a habit.) Other recordings before and after worked fine. Since others here have reported similar issues I suspect it is either a software issue or a network issue unless we are starting to see hardware failure in these things.

..Tom

Tom, try a hard reboot of the STB by unplugging it for a minute or so, then letting it reboot, then giving it about 1/2 hour to download any information. The reboot often solves these sorts of issues, but not always.

Also, check your signal strength. Often programmes are not recorded if the signal strength drops below a certain level, or if the channel has a dropout. See the Digital Home FAQ "Tips for SA STBs".

I've just been thinking this over a bit. I have a cable signal amplifier in line as the cable is split so many times in my house. The wiring, etc is properly done to ensure the PVR gets a very direct signal (ie: from outside, split once to the amplifier and then to the PVR). The only thing is that I do not have the ampifier on a UPS. I am going to get a UPS on that in case power surges from the freezer and other basement appliances might be having an effect on the amplifier. Even if this isn't causing the issue it wouldn't hurt.

..Tom

For some reason my 8300 recorded only the first 45 mins of Lost tonight. Wasn't too happy about that.

Thank god for timeshifting.

CBS was all screwed up because I recorded Rudolph for my kids and it didn't end until 9:10pm.

Did something delay the networks tonight?

I only got 20 mins of Cream and 10 mins of Lost last night.

I was watching Cream live for about the first 20 mins and switched away (the red light was still on). However, the pvr was off during Lost.

Sadly, I only noticed both problems just now so timeshifting won't help me now. Brutal.

I've never seen this issue on my 8300SD. I've only had the 8300HD for a week but l'll try a hard reboot anyway even though it hasn't helped Tom.

Joe,

The Cream concert is repeated on Friday. I watched it last night and it was superb.

Hi Joe!

Is there anything beyond "stock" about your unit or setup? (ie: external drive, etc.)

What area are you in?

Thanks,

Tom

I only got 20 mins of Cream and 10 mins of Lost last night.

I was watching Cream live for about the first 20 mins and switched away (the red light was still on). However, the pvr was off during Lost.

Sadly, I only noticed both problems just now so timeshifting won't help me now. Brutal.

I've never seen this issue on my 8300SD. I've only had the 8300HD for a week but l'll try a hard reboot anyway even though it hasn't helped Tom.

take-heed, Thanks!

Tom, I'm in Waterloo, Ont and am using stock 8300HD (Aside, I never understood need for external drive but I now understand after taping a few HD shows). My disk is currently at 30%.

I haven't checked signal strength yet nor called Rogers. I will be calling after work though.

I also taped Weeds in between the two botched recordings and it had no problem.

I called Rogers and everything looked fine from their end. I rebooted the box and last night's recordings were fine. I mentioned that others were having this issue but got no real answer to that. We've agreed that the pvr gets replaced if this issue happens again.

Thankfully, Cream is on again tonight but it looks like I've lost Lost.

Joesoap:

I emailed Rogers today expressing my extreme disatisfaction with what has been happening over the last while. They are sending a tech over on Monday but I really want to avoid getting the unit replaced unless they can see an actual problem. Realistically I don't expect a CSR to admit to a sporadic problem like this unless it is very widespread.

If one of you had these problems dissappear after a replacement I would do it in a sec but I doubt it is an individual unit's problem. (I would be happy to learn otherwise though!)

..Tom

Tom,

I'm on the fence wrt deciding where the issue is. If it was widespread, there would be more of us posting here. Yet, there seems to be enough of us to indicate it may be a problem bigger than just a few units.

My Cream recording stopped with 1 min remaining. Luckily the concert was over before that final missing minute. I taped a show this morning without incident.

I've set up some recordings just to see if the problem happens again at which point I'll be calling them again. It's a small sample size but the botched recordings have been limited to HD shows so far.

Be sure to let us know the result of the tech visit.

Hi!

I had the tech in today and he looked at the setup. He did change a splitter by the TV that he thought was acting up and also replaced my Radio Shack signal booster (it was one I purchased based on recommendations from one of the forums here and could handle the bandwidth of HDTV).

I don't know if this will fix the issues. He said it was possible that the splitter dropped the signal enough to cause a problem. If the signal dropped strength enough enough it could drop the recording so that makes sense. Combine it with the possibility of the booster not being quite right and it could cause occasional problems.

On top of that he mentioned that my area is still undergoing upgrades in the perimeter and that could occasionally cause problems.


The unfortunate thing is that this is the kind of problem that you only know if it is not fixed so I'll just have to wait and see.

..Tom

I don't have any splitters but I do have a booster than was installed by Rogers.

I have had no issues since last Friday when the Cream recording missed the final minute. I taped a bunch of shows since then to purposely try to see this issue but all is well now.

I had an interesting experience last night.

I had the set the PVR to record some shows on History and (I think) HD Discovery. At 8pm I would record/watch Survivor (on Global HD) and record the OC in HD (For my daughter). At 9 I would watch/record the apprentice and record CSI (I think on CTV HD).

At 7:45 I turned on the PVR and saw that two of the recordings I had done earlier in the day had been split up.. one twice, one three times. A few minutes between resuming the recording meant that the unit likely had reset. My daughter had been on the unit earlier so I could not be sure that was the case or if it was a cable outage

I decided to watch Survivor and Apprentice live because of the breakup of signals I had been having over the last while. I had absolutely no issues with the picture at all. The signal was perfect without a single drop-out or bad sound issue. I then watched the CSI I had recorded thinking there would be some drop outs and I had nothing but perfection in every respect.

Now, I don't know if the (possible) reboots earlier in the day fixed something or if maybe the cable itself had been improved so I'll keep my fingers crossed. (The only other change at my end since Monday was that the other digital terminal in the house was not on. Could a two or three year old digital box cause problems with the PVR?)

I did have a separate issue: I did notice that at 8 pm when Survivor was about to start and I had the channel already setup I was switched to the OC. At 9pm when Survivor was over and Apprentice was about to start the PVR switched me off of Global and onto the Channel on which CSI was recording. Later on in the evening when the news was on the channel switched on me again, this time from a recorded show I was watching. If I hit the last channel button I was not returned to 950. I suspect that a bug has been introduced that flips the PVR to whatever "other" channel is being recorded.

..Tom

I had the same problem recording Law and Order (I think). It was broken into 4 parts. All of them recorded perfectly, however. I also lost the last half hour of Alias and I am also experiencing the kick to recording bug while watching a prerecorded program.

Rogers or SA should fire the whole lot of the programmers and hire someone who knows what s/he is doing. It's only a VCR after all. It has less than a dozen functions and half of them are useless and the rest don't work properly. <sigh>

I have seen a consistant problem on one channel. I have been recording Disasters on History Channel (246 in my area). I haved it set to record "all" episodes.

What I noticed from yesterday is that every recording (i think it was on 4 times) started 11 minutes after it was scheduled to record and recorded the balance of the show. I wonder if anyone else migth try recording the same shows and see if they get the same results.

Thanks,

Tom

Hi!

Someone mentioned a week or two ago that perhaps I should just replace my unit as maybe the Hard drive was going.

Turns out they were correct.. yesterday morning I turned on the PVR and the front display said "HDDF". It did not start up. I followed the reboot procedure and all my recordings were gone. The main reason I didn't exchange it is that I had a number of recordings I wanted to keep; since they were now gone I exchanged it for a new one last night.

We'll see if that fixes up the issues I have been having.

..Tom