# Apparent root of lots of problems.....



## jsanders (Jan 21, 2004)

The 921 is now actually *preventing* me from watching OTA stations. Let me elaborate. I set up a timer to record "The District" on CBS OTA at 10pm on Saturday night. I saw the the clock blinking a few minutes before 10pm telling me that the 921 was about to attempt to record my show. I was watching 9421, Discovery HD at the time. Then, I switched to watch CSI around 9:58pm, which I recorded with a timer last Thursday. At 10:01pm, I got to be suspicious when the red light on the front panel didn't indicate that the recording had started.

Here is what makes this all to common situation interesting... I decided to stop watching CSI, and turn to CBS OTA to watch "The District", since I couldn't record it. I switched to CBS OTA, and I got a black screen. I swiched to ABC OTA, and it switched to channel 101. I hit 'menu' on the remote, and went to the "Local Channels" menu. It says that I can't access this menu while a recording is in process.

What I think is the root cause of a lot of the problems is that the OTA card is not being released properly. Then, in this case, when it tries to record, it is not that the timer isn't firing, it is, the problem is that it can't open the channel to record.

It is a bit frustrating to not be able to see the code, but it really appears that the channel, or port so to speak, isn't being closed properly, and it can't be re-opened. Everything, devices included, in Linux are files. In fact, I will bet if you could do something like "cd /dev; ls", you would see the tuners. If a file/port/device is not closed properly, can someone else re-open it?? I think that is the issue that needs to be explored.

A re-boot a day keeps the problems away!


----------



## peterd (Dec 17, 2003)

This is a very logical deduction, but here's a bit of info which suggests otherwise (that one problem is with the OTA tuner, and another with the timer implementation):

When something like this happens, try editing the timer to change the end time. For instance, I discover at 10:01pm that the unit is not recording OTA. I check the OTA menu and am told that there's a recording in progress and that I must stop the recording first. I go to the timer which did not _appear_ to fire, and change its end time to, say, 10:05pm. Then, at 10:06pm, I can once again access the OTA setup menu.

I think what happens is that the timer does fire, but the recording immediately aborts as soon as it is unable to successfully receive the OTA signal. The timer, however, _does not abort_.


----------



## srrobinson2 (Sep 16, 2003)

jsanders said:


> The 921 is now actually *preventing* me from watching OTA stations. Let me elaborate. I set up a timer to record "The District" on CBS OTA at 10pm on Saturday night. I saw the the clock blinking a few minutes before 10pm telling me that the 921 was about to attempt to record my show. I was watching 9421, Discovery HD at the time. Then, I switched to watch CSI around 9:58pm, which I recorded with a timer last Thursday. At 10:01pm, I got to be suspicious when the red light on the front panel didn't indicate that the recording had started.
> 
> Here is what makes this all to common situation interesting... I decided to stop watching CSI, and turn to CBS OTA to watch "The District", since I couldn't record it. I switched to CBS OTA, and I got a black screen. I swiched to ABC OTA, and it switched to channel 101. I hit 'menu' on the remote, and went to the "Local Channels" menu. It says that I can't access this menu while a recording is in process.
> 
> ...


I've actually managed to get an OTA event to fire, although I still experienced a black screen. Let me describe my steps:

1) do no choose weekly for your recording frequency--only use Once for OTA
2) set time before and after to zero
3) When the event fired, I was watching another DVR recording (like you were)
4) I noticed red light and once I finished watching previously recorded show, I attempted to change channels to the live OTA event being recorded and got a black screen
5) I went to the DVR menu and found my in progress local recording and clicked on it and then clicked "View" and it worked--I could then watch the program. In fact I pressed rewind and backed up to the beginning and watched the whole show.

Now, personally, this is a big fat pain! I certainly don't want to have to setup manual timer events every week. Dish needs to fix the problems (I think you had some solid analysis about the failure to close the open devices). Dish also needs to allow OTA HD channels to use already existing Guide information. Oh yeah, they need to fix their units to work with SuperDish locals too!


----------



## guruka (Dec 27, 2003)

peterd said:


> This is a very logical deduction, but here's a bit of info which suggests otherwise (that one problem is with the OTA tuner, and another with the timer implementation):
> 
> When something like this happens, try editing the timer to change the end time. For instance, I discover at 10:01pm that the unit is not recording OTA. I check the OTA menu and am told that there's a recording in progress and that I must stop the recording first. I go to the timer which did not _appear_ to fire, and change its end time to, say, 10:05pm. Then, at 10:06pm, I can once again access the OTA setup menu.
> 
> I think what happens is that the timer does fire, but the recording immediately aborts as soon as it is unable to successfully receive the OTA signal. The timer, however, _does not abort_.


Yes. I agree with that scenario, Peter. In fact I have taken to checking any OTA channel before tring to record it to be sure it's being received properly and not unavailable (giving the black 'acquiring signal' screen). If the channel is okay, it records okay. If the OTA tuner is kerfloogled (forgive the technical terminology) then I have to do the old 'Add DTV' routine and add any OTA channel, then - save-save, and they all appear okay again (nice that it does not require a reboot to get OTA back - but this has GOT to be fixed!) and the recording goes fine.

Of course, you can't do this unless you're home and babysitting the 921.

E*, you gotta fix it. 
E*, you gotta fix it.
E*, you gotta fix it.
E*, you gotta fix it.
E*, you gotta fix it.

.....G


----------



## jsanders (Jan 21, 2004)

peterd said:


> When something like this happens, try editing the timer to change the end time. For instance, I discover at 10:01pm that the unit is not recording OTA. I check the OTA menu and am told that there's a recording in progress and that I must stop the recording first. I go to the timer which did not _appear_ to fire, and change its end time to, say, 10:05pm. Then, at 10:06pm, I can once again access the OTA setup menu.
> 
> I think what happens is that the timer does fire, but the recording immediately aborts as soon as it is unable to successfully receive the OTA signal. The timer, however, _does not abort_.


Let me get this straight... The one piece of information I need to be clear on this is the start time. If I understand it, let's say the timer is supposed to record from 9pm to 10pm. You are saying that if it doesn't fire, if you change the end time, that this will free up the OTA setup menu? That is good news!

When you do this, does it start to record again, or does it just see that the start time has passed, so it doesn't make any attempts??

That is interesting. If I am understanding you correctly, it sounds like that is a good way to get the timer to 'release' the channel from the timer.

Here is the question I have for you. After moving the 'End' time, can you watch the OTA channel? Is the OTA channel viewable, or do you get a black screen or something.


----------



## peterd (Dec 17, 2003)

jsanders -

The key is moving the end time to one 2 or 3 minutes in the future. When that end time arrives, the tuner frees up. The recording does not restart (and if its a repeating timer you will, of course, need to re-edit it at some point to fix the stop time).

The OTA channel is not viewable afterwards, until you've done the "Add DTV" step again. I've found that when the OTA tuner is hosed, a successful "Add DTV" for any one OTA channel fixes all of them.


----------



## jsanders (Jan 21, 2004)

peterd said:


> jsanders -
> 
> The key is moving the end time to one 2 or 3 minutes in the future. When that end time arrives, the tuner frees up. The recording does not restart (and if its a repeating timer you will, of course, need to re-edit it at some point to fix the stop time).
> 
> The OTA channel is not viewable afterwards, until you've done the "Add DTV" step again. I've found that when the OTA tuner is hosed, a successful "Add DTV" for any one OTA channel fixes all of them.


Thanks for the insight PeterD, I will try adjusting the "End Time" when I'm prevented from doing an "Add DTV". That will at least allow me to reclaim some live viewing in the event that the PVR was unable to record.

I have to say though, the fact that you can't watch the tuner without doing an 
"Add DTV" seems to support my original conclusion too. The fact that you can't watch the channel appears to be the reason that it was unable to record. It doesn't appear that the timer failed to fire. If the timer did fail to fire, then you wouldn't have to change the "End Time" to get the timer to free up the "Local Channels" menu.

I think this issue is the root cause of a lot of the problems we are seeing. Fortunately, whatever this problem is, once it is fixed should give us a huge boost in receiver stability, and recording ability!


----------



## peterd (Dec 17, 2003)

I think we're in agreement. Timers fire, but the OTA tuner gets into a failed state. The code running the timer doesn't realize that the tuner is hosed, so while the recording aborts, the timer doesn't.


----------



## jsanders (Jan 21, 2004)

peterd said:


> I think we're in agreement. Timers fire, but the OTA tuner gets into a failed state. The code running the timer doesn't realize that the tuner is hosed, so while the recording aborts, the timer doesn't.


Hopefully, the 921 programers are in agreement too, and we can see a fix to this soon! By the way, I tried adjusting the "End Time" when two recordings didn't work tonight, it worked great as a work around! Thanks...


----------



## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Lately, I have been having excellent luck with timed event recordings firing off as scheduled. 
This is just a guess but one thing I have been consciously avoiding doing is creating a situation where I access more than two tuners at anyone time whether watching live with a background recording, or making two recordings at the same time. 
My rules for safer 921 operation:
OK to surf all channels if only recording one sat channel in the background.
OK to surf only sat channels if making one OTA channel recording in the background.
Never tune to an OTA channel to watch if recording another background OTA channel.
Never surf channels at all when recording any two channels. Just use another receiver. 
If you must watch something while making two background recordings, then watch without channel surfing or using any DVR functions, either of the two channels being recorded, but don't surf between those two. Stay put!

While recording two background channels, OK to watch a third recorded channel off the hard drive as long as you don't hit stop button. Play and skip ahead and back seem to be OK so far but not stop.

If I follow the above conditions, I have been having very good luck with all timer events. And, I have done many Hard drive program viewings while recording OTA and sat channels. The trick is to know what is going on in the background when watching live.

Here's a scenario that will kill two background scheduled recordings-
Be watching live, something like DiscHD. While watching two timer event recordings try to start, HBOHD and ShowtimeHD. Ain't gonna happen! That's 3 tuners for sat which is one more than available. Therefore both background recordings just fail to happen. So, when I plan to record two sat channels at the same time. I usually move to my 6000 for live viewing. IT is safer and so far I haven't had this method fail.


What E* needs to do is make a warning screen that pops up anytime one tries to access more than two tuners at a time, More than one OTA channel / tuner at a time, or use the stop button while background recording. Currently one of two things happen, the recordings just stop or don't fire as scheduled, or the system reboots.


----------



## Bogney (Jul 11, 2003)

DonLandis said:


> Here's a scenario that will kill two background scheduled recordings-
> Be watching live, something like DiscHD. While watching two timer event recordings try to start, HBOHD and ShowtimeHD. Ain't gonna happen! That's 3 tuners for sat which is one more than available. Therefore both background recordings just fail to happen.


Your situation as described works on my 921. A warning message comes on the screen just before the timers are scheduled to activate and the channel I was viewing changes to one of the ones that the timer triggered. Both of the timed recordings were successful.


----------



## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Bogney-

What does the warning message say on yours? I've never seen any warning message. The last time I had 2 scheduled recordings and was watching another channel (3rd tuner) the flashing clock came up but I was allowed to continue to watch and the background scheduled recordings didn't happen. That was last Friday evening. Same thing since day one. Never saw the warning message. If that is part of the software then there must be something I'm doing that bypasses it. Need to go look it up in the manual...time for a review.  Thanks.


----------



## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

Don - I got the warning message last night. I was watching the tech forum on the 921. During that hour there was another timer recording, and a 2nd one scheduled to start as the forum ended. I had the warning box pop up telling me a timer was about to fire and listing 3 options - change channel for the timer to fire, cancel the timer, and a third one that I don't remember.


----------



## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Thanks, now to figure out why mine doesn't do that. Or at least the way I had it set up in the past it didn't. I'll try to do some structured testing (permutated conditions)later today. One question- Were your timed recordings firing at the same time? MIne, as I recall were staggered by 30 minutes. Last Friday, the first fired off and when checked recorded 27 minutes of the hour. The second never fired. Both gave clock warning but no message.


----------



## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

No - my first timer fired at 7:00 and was set to run until 9:00. The second timer was set to fire at 8:00 and run until 9:30. The warning box appeared just before 8, and both timers fired and recorded correctly. Both were set to record from HD satellite channels.


----------



## Bogney (Jul 11, 2003)

DonLandis said:


> Were your timed recordings firing at the same time?


In my case both were set to go off at the same exact time. If it matters, the offset start and end times were both set to zero.


----------



## peterd (Dec 17, 2003)

Don -

I've seen the screen Mark describes. I turned off the clock display early on. Perhaps this explains the difference in behavior?

BTW - I agree with your rules, but I think this is awfully complicated (which underscores why I contend the 921 is not yet ready to be a primary STB). My solution is to only use the 921 for recording (and viewing recordings). Then the only challenge is to avoid the Stop button.

The 6000 remains my primary STB for "just watching TV" (as in "Why can't I _just watch TV_?!"  ).


----------

