# Any news on the maximum timers???



## Bloody Templar (Mar 3, 2007)

I've read a couple of old threads regarding the 288 event maximum, and it seems some users have shrugged it off as "not a big deal". I disagree - I think it's a very big deal for anyone who has ever had a TiVo (like me). 

In the interests of public disclosure, I'd like post a copy of an email I sent Dish tech support tonight, and then follow it up with some questions.

--- Begin Paste ---

I've been a Dish customer for a couple of weeks now, and while I'm very pleased with your signal and programming choices, I've got to express my dissatisfaction with your HD DVR, the ViP622.

I previously emailed you regarding a scenario in which I would want to be able to record new episodes of a show with a high priority, and reruns of the same show with a lower priority. You replied that this was not possible with the current software.

I've now discovered a larger, much more serious issue that really vexes me. Apparently, the DVR has a maximum number of 288 scheduled events. Between 20 event timers (most of which are set for "new episode") and 5 dish passes, I've currently got 80 events scheduled that result in a recording and 208 skipped events. This puts me at 288 events and I can add no more timers.

I've used a good DVR (DirecTV's old TiVo line), and I've used a downright awful DVR (Time Warner's SA 8300HD). Neither DVR imposed this kind of arbitrary limitation. How on earth have you guys been distributing this thing for over a year without having fixed this issue?

I'm very, very torn. On the one hand, I love your channel lineup, your customer service, your signal quality, and, for the most part, your DVR. On the other hand, these two issues with your DVR are such fundamental flaws, totally counterintuitive to the core benefits of even USING a DVR, that I am seriously wishing I had done more research before becoming a Dish subscriber. Had I known about these limitations, I would have preferred to stay with Time Warner's otherwise inferior product.

Please, please, PLEASE tell me you have plans to update the DVR software to address these limitations. I want to love Dish Network, but right now, I'm just frustrated and wishing I'd stayed with cable.

--- End Paste ---

So, I pose the following questions - 

1) Has anybody from E* ever given an explanation as why this limitation exists?

2) Has anybody from E* ever indicated that an enhancement is a possibility?

3) Why are the folks who expect this type of functionality such a minority? I thought the advantage to a DVR was that you could set it up with all kinds of timers/wish lists and let it just record whatever comes by... But it appears that E* expects users to manage the timer list manually, set up precisely what programs record when. So I guess my family and I were just spoiled by our DirecTiVo?

Please don't flame me too hard... Like I said, I want to love Dish, but I'm a little frustrated right now.


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## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

Welcome to DBSTalk, BT. :hi:

Dish has heard loud and clear, and the timer and event maximums have been increased, tested, and should be in the next release.


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## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

Welcome Bloody Templer... Well looks like there is some good news on the horizon. I have actually been following this issues a while. As for why the limit, my guess is that they was some performance concerns and therefore E* set the limits where they felt most users would not run into it and the box would perform well.

There is a sticky on the top of the forum that has a link to these discussions and I believe some tips are offered to improve timer management. I know there have been times where users have been able to improve there timers counts with some timer management changes and others have not. The main one that catches a lot of people is using the Dish Pass when a new episode or all episode timer would work. 

Most of the use cases where people have hit thess limits are people watching shows that contain lots of re-runs or people using lots of Dish Passes to find unique shows. 

Personally am happy to hear that the limit is increasing and to see Dish is listing to customer concerns. As for taking so long, well based on the number of threads I have read here on this issue it is one that a lot of us power users have not ran into which makes me think the number is even smaller for the non-power user so the issue does not have wide spread effect. From my perspective, it appears to be a issue that for most is a non-issue but for the people it effects it has a high pain factor.

That could explain why it has not made it to the top of the queue until know... Well lets hope it makes it into the next build as Mark mentioned and that will provide some relief for people having a larger timer need.


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## cornflakes (Sep 30, 2005)

Mark Lamutt said:


> Welcome to DBSTalk, BT. :hi:
> 
> Dish has heard loud and clear, and the timer and event maximums have been increased, tested, and should be in the next release.


YAY! I didn't know that! Goody! Thanks for the news!

Do you know what the new limits are?


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## patmurphey (Dec 21, 2006)

Maybe you should check the whining over on D* forums about the event limits on the HR20. Some limits need to be applied - I'm glad that E* is improving them.

Pat


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## Bloody Templar (Mar 3, 2007)

Hey, thanks for the news! I feel a lot better now.


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## lujan (Feb 10, 2004)

Those of us that have gone through the growing pains of HD DVR's (921, 622, etc.) learn to change our behavior when using receivers with these types of limitations. I never use the dish pass and I hardly have any re-occurring timers. I manually set my timers every day. I've learned to set the next timer as soon as I've finished watching the show. For instance, as soon as I'm done watching "Rome", I set the timer for the next weeks show. I'm not entirely confident with the descriptions always having the word "New" in the guide so that the 622 knows to only record "new" programs and that's why I don't use that feature. I only have about two or three shows that are weekly or daily shows so I never run into this 288 event limitation.


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## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

Personally I just keep an eye on the maximum and keep my limit about 20 below. Actually I am not even close with mine and I have a decent number of Dish Passes and weekly all timers. It really depends what your timers are recording, if you are setting up a lot of timers for shows that tend to repeat a lot then yes you will chew up those timer events quickly.


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## Bloody Templar (Mar 3, 2007)

Ron Barry said:


> Personally I just keep an eye on the maximum and keep my limit about 20 below. Actually I am not even close with mine and I have a decent number of Dish Passes and weekly all timers. It really depends what your timers are recording, if you are setting up a lot of timers for shows that tend to repeat a lot then yes you will chew up those timer events quickly.


Well, I'm sure you've heard how hard it is to do with a few DishPasses set for some kids' shows, as well as "New Episode" timers for cable shows that run 10 times in a week. I mean, I know I could do it all manually, but that's such a pain, especially if you're used to being able to just "set it and forget it". My wife says I'm spoiled by TiVo. 

I am so stoked that it's going to be increased!!! :hurah:

If anyone's interested, I've blogged about this at netguru.hireageek.net (Can't post as a URL yet, new user restriction.  )


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## Hall (Mar 4, 2004)

Mark Lamutt said:


> Dish has heard loud and clear, and the timer and event maximums have been increased, tested, and should be in the next release.


 Unless Dish makes it "unlimited", how long before people ***** and moan that they've hit the new limit ?? 

Rest assured, people will intentionally set timers just to "discover" the limit too !!


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## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

The way I understand it, "unlimited" is very difficult because of the timer database structure, and often it gets refreshed. You start getting a huge number of events in the database, operating speed starts suffering noticibly. 

I know what the new numbers are, but am not going to post them. They're quite a bit higher, though.


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## patmurphey (Dec 21, 2006)

Have you thought of using weekly or daily timers for all of those shows that repeat multple times a day?

Pat


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## TP715 (Jan 15, 2007)

Mark Lamutt said:


> Dish has heard loud and clear, and the timer and event maximums have been increased, tested, and should be in the next release.


Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

I know many power users say this is no big deal, but for normal users, especially those coming from TiVos, this can be a very big deal. My wife ran up against these limits essentially immediately when moving her preferences over from our TiVo. Working around the limits was a pain. We are *really* glad you are increasing them!


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## BobaBird (Mar 31, 2002)

I can wait for the software to be released to find out the numbers. At least I think I can. Certainly this basic information will be in the release notes.


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## James Long (Apr 17, 2003)

"Increased number of timers" is all they have to write, if they acknowledge the change.


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## Brian Ristuccia (Jan 8, 2008)

Mark Lamutt said:


> Welcome to DBSTalk, BT. :hi:
> 
> Dish has heard loud and clear, and the timer and event maximums have been increased, tested, and should be in the next release.


Is this change live yet? It seems like my ViP-722 won't let me create more than 35 timers.


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## TulsaOK (Feb 24, 2004)

Brian Ristuccia said:


> Is this change live yet? It seems like my ViP-722 won't let me create more than 35 timers.


:welcome_s Brian

Are you receiving an error message when attempting to set timers? I have 77 timers set and have not encountered any problems adding more. Can you provide more information like what kind of timers you are setting?


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## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

If my memory serves.. Max timers is 96 and max timer events are 576. like TulsaOk said.. What error are you getting? You can check the max timer events by pressing DVR twice (Recorded Shows list) and look in the bottom right of the screen.


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

Brian Ristuccia said:


> Is this change live yet? It seems like my ViP-722 won't let me create more than 35 timers.


As others have said... it depends on what the error you are seeing is and what kind of timers you are defining.

a timer for all Family Guy on all channels, for instance, would just be one timer but would be a boatload of events... so if you set timers for all and the programs come on frequently on a bunch of channels... you could blow by the events limit with just a handful of timers defined.


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## Brian Ristuccia (Jan 8, 2008)

HDMe said:


> As others have said... it depends on what the error you are seeing is and what kind of timers you are defining.
> 
> a timer for all Family Guy on all channels, for instance, would just be one timer but would be a boatload of events... so if you set timers for all and the programs come on frequently on a bunch of channels... you could blow by the events limit with just a handful of timers defined.


Yes. I found it. It's the kids shows on PBS. One of these can easily eat up over a hundred event slots if entered as a dish pass. It's particularly bad in my area, where each airing of the show guzzles down at least 9 slots:

Local NH PBS Cannel: Once on high sat local channel, once on mapped (2)
Local MA PBS (WGBH): Once on high sat local, once on mapped, once on WGBH-DT OTA (3)
Local MA PBS (WGBH): Once on high sat local, once on mapped, once on WGBX-DT 044-01, once on WGBX-DT KIDS (044-03). (4)

For something like Sesame Street which airs a dozen times a day, this can gulp down literally hundreds of slots.


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## Brian Ristuccia (Jan 8, 2008)

Brian Ristuccia said:


> Yes. I found it. It's the kids shows on PBS. One of these can easily eat up over a hundred event slots if entered as a dish pass. It's particularly bad in my area, where each airing of the show guzzles down at least 9 slots:
> 
> Local NH PBS Cannel: Once on high sat local channel, once on mapped (2)
> Local MA PBS (WGBH): Once on high sat local, once on mapped, once on WGBH-DT OTA (3)
> ...


Has anyone at Dish Network given any thought to improving the way the timer list is generated for Dish Passes? For example, excluding either the high numbered or downmapped local channel when populating the timer list would cut the requirement in half for most shows on broadcast TV.


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## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

This is one area where I would like to see improvement. Map downs can definitely add to timer event count explosion. 

Brain... What I would suggest would be to use a All or New episode timer that way you only get them for a particular channel and it will not cross channels. To even further reduce timer event might want to consider going with a weekly or daily timer..... That is what I do with my son's Pokemon shows.


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

I completely forgot to mention the downmapping deal.. I notice when I set a DishPass timer for a specific channel that has a mapdown, I get two events (one for the channel mapdown and the other for the actual number) with one skipped. So if you set a timer for something that has a lot of play times on a mapdown channel, you double the number of events... and then you might fall off the boat!

I too would like to see that handled differently... not creating unneccesary duplicate events when the receiver *should* be smart enough to know the mapdown is the same channel.


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## whatchel1 (Jan 11, 2006)

I finally did it I ran into max number timers today. I tried to set a record on the Oscars while it was in progress. It popped up you have reached your max number of timers, etc. I thought oh I just need to more programs to record later so tried that. Still no go. So I looked at how many timers were going and couldn't figure out why I couldn't record. I later wanted to set a timer for "A Raisin Under the Sun". Still no go. Then I figured out what it was really saying that I had hit the max number not a conflict of too many at one time. So I had to go into the timers and delete several that don't have any shows coming up in the next few wks. Boy they need to increase the number again.


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