# more ZSR woes -- can you say cable?



## erh1117 (Feb 1, 2005)

Another night. Another ZSR. This time, the ZSR was the same show (different episode) that I tried to record last night (SAT 827 at 6:00 pm) with a ZSR.

At least tonight, I erased the ZSR without viewing, so at least I didn’t wipe out the HD (oops, I forgot – the 921 already did that for me last night!!!!)

I know that I’ve said it before (and am hardly the first), but this is a POS. It cannot be relied upon to function as designed, advertised, or intended. E* selling this sh*t is dangerously close to violating both federal and state consumer acts (i.e. the FTC act). If nothing else, anyone who bought this dog of a product would win an implied warranty of merchantability claim if they sought and were refused a refund!!

 


Mark -- anyone --- are these clowns at E* going to fix this or are they just going to ply the usual BS???


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## rcarmer (Oct 6, 2004)

Come on Ed. You only have $1000 in it. Have been promised a fix for a year. What do you expect?


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## KKlare (Sep 24, 2004)

If you have a ZSR, you must reboot (preferably with a power cord pull rather than the front panel button) to ensure you will not get a ZSR on the next recording. The overnight reset may help but it is safest to do the pull as soon as you have 10 minutes free. This can be a bear when you have overlapping recordings as I did during the Showtime weekend+. I was unable to get about 6 non-repeated shows out of say 15 ZSRs and 40 good ones.
-Ken


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## boylehome (Jul 16, 2004)

KKlare said:


> If you have a ZSR, you must reboot (preferably with a power cord pull rather than the front panel button) to ensure you will not get a ZSR on the next recording. The overnight reset may help but it is safest to do the pull as soon as you have 10 minutes free. This can be a bear when you have overlapping recordings as I did during the Showtime weekend+. I was unable to get about 6 non-repeated shows out of say 15 ZSRs and 40 good ones.
> -Ken


Sometimes even power cord re-boots do not fully fix the problem. I had to take mine back to ground zero and rebuild.


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## Jerry G (Jul 12, 2003)

Another ZSR. I tried to get around it by not having any overlap on two successive recordings (by eliminating the padding). Didn't work. The second recording was a ZSR. This damn 921 has become a worthless pile of garbage and Dish isn't doing a damn thing about it. Instead of adding new feature, they can't even get the basic functionality to work. I'm through with Dish. As soon as I can, I'm switching to DirecTV and getting an HDTivo. I don't care if DirecTV compresses the hell out of their HD. At least I'll be able to record it and actually get a recording. Screw Dish. They don't care about their customers in any way, shape, or form. And the Eldon engineers are just plain idiots. I don't think they could even fix a toaster.

P.S. BTW, trying to call Dish support to vent my frustrations just adds to the frustrations given the long hold times to get through to support. I gave up. Damn Dish. Damn Charlie. Damn Eldon. That's it. I'm through with this garbage excuse for a company!


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## Mike D-CO5 (Mar 12, 2003)

But tell us how you really feel Jerry.:sure:


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## ocnier (May 8, 2003)

Mike D-CO5 said:


> But tell us how you really feel Jerry.:sure:


Yeah, but you gotta admit he has a point. I think this will only be truly slated when the SBC media portal comes out. I strongly suspect that it will not only work out of the box, but work well. This in turn will truly confirm that dish is utterly incompetent when it comes to equipment manufacture.


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## Jerry G (Jul 12, 2003)

Mike D-CO5 said:


> But tell us how you really feel Jerry.:sure:


Admittedly, I did go over the top. But there does come a point where the level of frustration reaches a point that rational and reasonable thinking is overcome by anger. Mark was kind enough to offer to get in touch with the 921 team to try to get me a "good" 921. I haven't heard back from them yet. This will be my third 921 in a couple of months. I'll give it one more try. But if the failed timers and zsr persist with the next 921, that will be it. I'll have to accept the loses in the 921 and two 811s and just switch to DirecTV and get an HDTivo and another HD DirecTV receiver. You can only fight Dish and Eldon for so long and then it's time to give up and move on.

BTW, what's even more frustrating is reading about the folks who aren't having the major problems that many of us are having. That would indicate that in addition to software problems, some of the causes of these issues is hardware. And that doesn't bode well for Dish and their hardware quality control. Certainly makes me think twice about investing in Dish's future MPEG-4 boxes. Dish will have to really prove to me that any future boxes are competently built with competent software before I invest any more money with Dish. I'd certainly tend to trust DirecTV's hardware over Dish's.


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## ntexasdude (Jan 23, 2005)

ocnier said:


> Yeah, but you gotta admit he has a point. I think this will only be truly slated when the SBC media portal comes out. I strongly suspect that it will not only work out of the box, but work well. This in turn will truly confirm that dish is utterly incompetent when it comes to equipment manufacture.


Wow, that's the first I've heard about the SBC media portal! Sounds very very cool. 

I may have to junk my 921 for this beauty - if I can afford it. 

Here are some links media portal

more media portal


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## MrJ (Mar 13, 2004)

Remember how many recordings you had? That's how many ZSR's you will get. That's because when the 921 deleted all of your recordings, it didn't actually erase them. It just forgot about them by corrupting some internal storage. Apparently the 921 stores the DVR list information in fixed slots, and there is no way to wipe these slots clean except by making a new recording and deleting it. And it somehow gets confused when the slot isn't actually erased but it tries to use it for a new recording, resulting in a ZSR. My hard drive was full when I lost everything, so I had to create over 200+ recordings (99% ZSR's) in order to reset all of the recording slots. It took a few hours, but I haven't had any ZSR's since.


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## elmc (Jan 7, 2005)

Has anyone else gotten this to work? I am still getting ZSRs and its frustrating the hell out of me. So all I should do is set up a bunch of recordings overnight, fill up my hard drive, then erase what i dont want?


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

This is an interesting theory, but seem unlikely to me.

I would be very happy to be proven wrong, as that would give everyone a workaround.


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