# L182- Timer didn't fire (not again)!



## ggw2000 (Dec 22, 2003)

First timer set up for CBSHD (sat) for NCIS at 8 tonight. Looked at about 8:15 and noticed timer did not fire. I hope we are not back to the same problems of sat timers not firing that I had a couple of weeks ago that forced me to hook my 501 up as a continuing backup for recordings  .


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## thevoice (Sep 24, 2002)

ggw2000 said:


> First timer set up for CBSHD (sat) for NCIS at 8 tonight. Looked at about 8:15 and noticed timer did not fire. I hope we are not back to the same problems of sat timers not firing that I had a couple of weeks ago that forced me to hook my 501 up as a continuing backup for recordings  .


I would do at least 2 reboots after any 721/921 upgrade... Mine did this also (as with no themes) and after the second reboot everything seemed to be working proper.


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## Scott Greczkowski (Mar 21, 2002)

Same thing on mine, none of my timers fired tonight. (Including NCIS)


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## Scott Greczkowski (Mar 21, 2002)

Update, NONE of my timers fired last night.

My wife was not happy.

Tonight before I leave for Texas I will put my new 921 which arrived last night in the bedroom, hopefully that will work better.


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## Curtis0620 (Apr 22, 2002)

Time to get that new HD-DirecTiVo.


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## Big D (Aug 19, 2002)

My NCIS did not fire, however 24 did after a reboot. I agree we always need to do a couple of reboots after any new load comes down. Probably would not hurt to delete timers and reenter them just to be safe. Crazy that we have to do this.


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## ibglowin (Sep 10, 2002)

Ours has been in the bedroom since day one. If we go out of town we set up timers on the 508. Not taking any chances.

Maybe someday our $1000 receiver can come out and be on display in the living room. :nono2:



Scott Greczkowski said:


> Update, NONE of my timers fired last night.
> 
> My wife was not happy.
> 
> Tonight before I leave for Texas I will put my new 921 which arrived last night in the bedroom, hopefully that will work better.


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

My timers fired fine. I even set up all my timers this week with conflicts in the pads to see if they would work around that and so far, no problem. Still having an issue with one weak channel which caused me some grief about 2AM when I tried to force a reboot. It took me quite awhile before I recovered from that reboot. Success after lots of patience waiting for things to happen. Now we're back to normal again and I had no problems adding the channels back manually. Auto scan messes the mapping up now. Favorite lists are once again working for me.

BTW- I started watching NCIS about 45 minutes behind and then 60 minutes from the next timer recording. Everything was fine!

I hear the HDTIVO's timers work great, but you can't get to the programs as it is too slow so you have to type in the show for recording, then you record it and the timer fires but no audio, on some receivers no video. Hey, just kidding you TIVO heads. If you think the TIVO is perfect you really need to do some reading, Dewey. I put off my purchase of the TIVO for another month and until I learn they have these Killer issues under control.


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## Redster (Jan 14, 2004)

We have had a timer problem since I soft booted 921 for the L182. I did do a power plug reboot later but not for 2 mins 20 some odd seconds. I did a power plug reboot this morning for 5 mins so we will see. This is what has happened. Last night at 7:30pm, we selected American Idol (chan. 8450) to record using the create once timer. We then selected both shows of According to Jim, for 9 to 9:30 and 9:30 to 10 on a different channel, think it was 8451. Because we didnt get any recordings the night before, I was watching to see what happened. The timer for 8 - 9 (American Idol) did not start,, did not get flashing timer icon either. When show started, I hit record button and it gave me option to record rest of show. I got up at midnight and noticed the record light was still on though unit had been turned off and no timers should be active. I checked dvr and I did not get the other 2 recordings from 9 - 10. The only timer I have set for weekly is the wife's from 11am - 12pm on OTA channel 013-01. Wife is getting pissed off now,, all DVR functions were working great even after L182 loaded and showed under system info, I just hadnt rebooted it. Problems started when I lost the guide over the weekend for everything cept local channel I was watching. Did the soft reboot to fix (bug report submitted) now have timer issues.


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## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

Redster - was your 921 tuned to an OTA channel before the timers were set to fire?


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## Allen Noland (Apr 23, 2002)

Mine missed a timer last night for the first time in a while. It was tunned to an OTA channel but was off. It had worked last week under the same circumstances


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Mark-

Can you review the current recommendation for timers, as in: Need for an OTA timer to fire, do we leave it set to that OTA channel or is Sat channel OK. etc. etc-?

I haven't had a problem lately, except for that CSR screwup where the entire receiver was off line for 24 hours. Last evening my 3 timers set months ago for Tuesday fired fine, even though The Guardian is no longer on. It fired anyway.  

Maybe you could set a few sticky posts that are locked. The reboot power plug for 2:20 minimum is one, this timer can be another. It would be nice to have a "procedure for least problems" in a place without editorial comments and confusion.


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## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

As far as I know, the timer recommendations haven't changed. The back to back satellite timers or the back to back satellite/OTA timers recommendation still stands, and is stickied. 

For single timers, I don't have nearly as good a feel for it because all of my single timers fire. But I'd think that it would be a good idea to have the 921 tuned to an OTA channel if a single OTA timer is about to fire. Satellite shouldn't matter. "Power" state shouldn't matter, and doesn't seem to make any difference with my 921. I don't touch the pad times with mine when setting up timers. I think that's a good recommendation.


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## Redster (Jan 14, 2004)

Mark Lamutt said:


> Redster - was your 921 tuned to an OTA channel before the timers were set to fire?


Mark,

We were watching OTA channel 008-01 (Indianapolis WISHTV) at 7:45 when we brought up the guide and changed guide to Sat Locals, we then selected American Idol on 8450 (Indianapolis WXIN) to record, it went through create timer screen. We then jumped guide forward to 9 and selected the According to Jim program for both 9 - 9:30 and 9:30 - 10pm, these also went through the create timer screens. After about 10 minutes we noticed the timer icon wasnt flashing so we checked timers under DVR, the one for 8 - 9 did not list at all, I tried again to create but it wouldnt show, the other 2 listed under DVR. I then switched over to channel 8450 with about 5 mins to go and tried to create timer, again it says it created but didnt show. We then waited for the show to start and hit record button, that gave option to record to end of show which seems to have worked (I havent checked it yet but time length is okay). The other 2 timers didnt fire and we were watching the Sat local 8450 when we turned off and went to bed.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

Stick with Mark L's data gathering for now so as to help out, but I've had similar situations (without OTA) where the solution was to delete ALL timers and do a power-plug reboot. This seems to reinitialize a corrupted timer database. Check your Menu-7 Action Order and see if it's screwed up - that's what's happened to me.

I'll make a wild speculation that the index into the database gets farkled, thereby causing events to be missed, or fire at the wrong times.


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## jsanders (Jan 21, 2004)

Curtis0620 said:


> Time to get that new HD-DirecTiVo.


I returned mine back to Circuit City last Saturday, couldn't deal with their snail-slow grid guide, hideous remote (controls stereo volume but no on/off button as one of many bad things about it), higher monthly cost, no banner guide, IR (not RF) remote, no RF out, it's hideously ugly, no indicator of free HD space, no picture-in-picture, no picture in channel guide (it's an overlay), no 30 second skip ahead w/o reprogramming stuff, no caller ID, etc... The 921 has bugs being worked out, and it still has a lot of nice features. Make sure you do some real research on it before you decide to switch. The HR10-250 is exact same software, and form factor as the hughes SD TiVo. If you want a demonstration of it, try that one out at the store or a friend's house.

Edit (5/26): added one more con to list of cons.


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## jsanders (Jan 21, 2004)

I've noticed some very interesting behavior with L182, and it is better.

The ONLY time a timer doesn't fire for me is when the channel gets lost and needs to be re-scanned. At first, I needed to re-boot, then re-scan. Now, I just re-scan the channels, and the timers work properly again.

With L182, I'm not loosing the channels randomly anymore (yea, it's only been a week and didn't want to discuss this until later). I still do loose the channels, but it consistently occurs when I reboot the machine!

For me now, a daily reboot is a bad thing, and doesn't keep the 921s problems away. It adds to them!

If I don't reboot, I don't loose the channels, and everything works as advertized! It is very nice.

Has anyone else noticed this??

Seems like it is time to change my signature again..


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## jsanders (Jan 21, 2004)

SimpleSimon said:


> I'll make a wild speculation that the index into the database gets farkled, thereby causing events to be missed, or fire at the wrong times.


Database gets farkled said the database man! I agree. I think I can make a proveable case for it. When I would loose a channel, timers wouldn't fire. I wanted to at least catch the rest of the show "live". Someone posted here that if you edited the end time on the timer, it would release the OTA tuner so you could re-scan the channels. This worked! But, there was a *latent* danger. When a timer was edited under this scenario, it was actually DUPLICATED! The duplicated timer is at the beginning of the list because its end time hasn't changed. I just thought it was a bug that worked out to my advantage in that the end timer didn't get edited, like trying to change padding values. It was latent because since the end time was shortened, that timer stopped trying to record, and it was PUT AT THE END OF THE TIMER LIST (list was sorted by time), so I didn't see the timer was dupicated! The next week would come around, and most of the time it would still record the show. However, consistently, recording 20/20 would cause a timer conflict because I had multiple timers (duplicated from the previous week). At this point, it was a HUGE mess to get everything cleaned up. Deleting the entire timer list would have fixed it though.


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## Allen Noland (Apr 23, 2002)

A_Noland said:


> Mine missed a timer last night for the first time in a while. It was tunned to an OTA channel but was off. It had worked last week under the same circumstances


More info:

I turned on the 921 8 minutes into the program when I discovered it wasn't recording. The 921 was on 002-1. I tuned to 023-1 (the channel the timer was supposed to fire on) and recorded the rest of it manually. (nothing like missing the first 8 minutes of the SEASON finally  ). I didn't have to re-add the channel. There were no timers before or after it.


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## Redster (Jan 14, 2004)

Well, I havent looked to see what scanned channels are showing because they are all there in the guide and I have viewed them. Problem with timers didnt show up till I did a hard reboot. After L182 loaded (and was showing under sysinfo without reboot) everything was fine. It was only this weekend after I lost the guide except for OTA channel I was tuned too that I did a hard reboot. Guess all the changes kicked in then. OTA is still recording though,,, so it seems to me,, its a timer issue, nothing to do with OTA. Its the Sat channels not recording by timer now. Will test again tonight now that I have done a 5 min cold reboot.


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## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

jsanders said:


> I've noticed some very interesting behavior with L182, and it is better.
> 
> The ONLY time a timer doesn't fire for me is when the channel gets lost and needs to be re-scanned. At first, I needed to re-boot, then re-scan. Now, I just re-scan the channels, and the timers work properly again.
> 
> With L182, I'm not loosing the channels randomly anymore (yea, it's only been a week and didn't want to discuss this until later). I still do loose the channels, but it consistently occurs when I reboot the machine!


That, jsanders, is one of the most important pieces of information that I've seen in the last week or two, and will go a long ways towards fixing what's wrong.


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## jsanders (Jan 21, 2004)

Mark Lamutt said:


> That, jsanders, is one of the most important pieces of information that I've seen in the last week or two, and will go a long ways towards fixing what's wrong.


I just hope it is reproducable, observable, and duplicatable by other people. L182 has been a great improvement for me!


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