# Dish Network 522 DVR Name Based Recording problems



## ryank808 (Jan 14, 2005)

I have a Dish Network 522 DVR, and ever since the NBR software update I've never gotten any sort of recurring event timer to work correctly. (Software version: L232-GALD-N).

Once a make an All Episodes, New Episodes, Daily, Mon-Fri, Weekly, or a DISH pass timer it searches for events that match the criteria and makes the appropriate timers (which in my case would be whenever the show plays within about 44 hours of when I make the timer). But it doesn't seem to ever search for new occurances of the show after that first search when making the timer. So a "Monday-Friday" timer will work the first day, and the second day after I make it, but after that it doesn't do anything, so I have to delete it and re-make it all over again every day or two days. This is a serious "downgrade" for me, as the "dumb" timers in the previous version (pre-mid-December) worked fine for me, albeit as expected they would record whatever was in the time slot they were set for even if it wasn't the program I wanted.

Unfortunately, when I noticed the new features I deleted all my existing "dumb" timers for my favorite shows, thinking that the new timer system would be better.

Is anyone else having this problem, and is there a way to fix it or create "dumb" timers again that don't follow the NBR rules?

As a sidenote, I'm in Hawaii and I only have one dish looking at 119, while I have never been able to conculsively get a straight answer on this I assume that's why I can only get a 44-hour guide. I read the the EEPG guide for (Microsoft/WebTV) DishPlayers is only available off of sat. 110, is that the same for regular DISH receivers/DVRs too? (My 322 (which doesn't have DishPlayer in it's name) also only gets 44-hrs. too, instead of the 3 (?) days it should get.) Dish Network CSRs have been pretty clueless about this situation, one told me the problem was that I have to have at least 70% signal for the EPG to work properly (which I do!), another said that I should turn off my receivers at night using the button on the front (not on the remote) and leave them off all night to get the software to update and "it should be fixed" (it wasn't).

Thanks,
Ryan
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## geobernd (Nov 4, 2004)

ryank808 said:


> As a sidenote, I'm in Hawaii and I only have one dish looking at 119, while I have never been able to conculsively get a straight answer on this I assume that's why I can only get a 44-hour guide.


You will need to have a dish looking at 110 for the 9 day EEPG guide. There is no way around it - the guide is only trasmitted off 110. I suspect that your timers are not updated properly because the guide is missing. I am not sure about the 70 signal requirement on the 522 - the 522 reports signals lower than e.g. a 510 so the requirement might be a bit lower too.... Can you get 110, maybe with a 30" or 36" dish? That will most likely solve you problem...


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## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

Do you have to put the 522 into standby mode to get the guide downloads nightly? That may be your problem.

But, isn't there still a way with the 522 to create manual time-based timers? When you pull up Menu-7, isn't there a Timer button on the right side, from which you can create a manual timer?


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## mindwarp (May 19, 2003)

Is that so... do the 522 needs the 110 dish for the guide like the 7200???


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## chaddux (Oct 10, 2004)

mindwarp said:


> Is that so... do the 522 needs the 110 dish for the guide like the 7200???


It helps to read the thread BEFORE you post so you don't ask a question that was just answered.

"You will need to have a dish looking at 110 for the 9 day EEPG guide. There is no way around it - the guide is only trasmitted off 110."


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## ryank808 (Jan 14, 2005)

Any idea if one of these http://www.channelmaster.com/pdf/75E_GAINMSTR.pdf (an eliptical D* Phase III like dish, but 75 cm (30 in.)) would work in Hawaii?

A person on SatelliteGuys from Hawaii ommented that you need a 30" or 36" dish to pick up 110W (24" supposedly works as a bare minimum, but only for PPV, not AT180 -- I guess the AT180 transponders are weak over here?).


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## chaddux (Oct 10, 2004)

ryank808 said:


> Any idea if one of these http://www.channelmaster.com/pdf/75E_GAINMSTR.pdf (an eliptical D* Phase III like dish, but 75 cm (30 in.)) would work in Hawaii?
> 
> A person on SatelliteGuys from Hawaii ommented that you need a 30" or 36" dish to pick up 110W (24" supposedly works as a bare minimum, but only for PPV, not AT180 -- I guess the AT180 transponders are weak over here?).


I think that the BEST infomation would be from an experienced retailer/installer in Hawaii. Since they deal with these issues every day, they can probably give you highly accurate information.


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## ryank808 (Jan 14, 2005)

I forgot about the "Manual Timer" mode. But unfortunately, even that doesn't work, even with manual timers the receiver still needs to refresh/remake the individual sub-timers that meet the criteria (in the case of manual timers, the time slot), and it doesn't do this. It just "searches for events" once when selecting "Create Timer", and never gets around to doing that ever again. It's like they broke my DVR. I'm so suprised that Dish would put out such shoddy software. I think it's probably due to the fact that I have a 44-hour guide. I'm like a second-class customer since I don't get 110, they don't even seem to take us into account---why did they even move the EEPG off of 119 in the first place?! (119 is their core satellite after all right?) .

Time to think about a switch to Time Warner, or DirecTV maybe... Charlie will have to eat what he paid my installer as well as whatever it costs to ship back and put my receivers back into service in the household of the next victim... (my lifespan as a paying Dish customer would be 4 mos.).


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

ryank808 said:


> I'm so suprised that Dish would put out such shoddy software.


Unfortunately, we're not. 


ryank808 said:


> why did they even move the EEPG off of 119 in the first place?!


I don't think it was ever ON 119.


ryank808 said:


> Charlie will have to eat what he paid my installer as well as whatever it costs to ship back and put my receivers back into service in the household of the next victim...


No he won't - the retailer is the one that gets the shaft when you drop service within the first year.


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## nychgan (Feb 1, 2005)

chaddux said:


> "You will need to have a dish looking at 110 for the 9 day EEPG guide. There is no way around it - the guide is only trasmitted off 110."


I think this is clearly a bug in the software. Dishnetwork should roll out a new patch to fix this problem as soon as possible because a lot of people are expericing the same problem.

The EEPG guide downloaded by my DVR only has 2 days of programming guide. Regardless of how many days of information the EEPG guide contains, a good software should be smart enough to update the schedule after each download of the EEPG guide.

As ryank808 mentioned above, the manual timer is not functioning properly in the current software release. From my understanding, a manual timer should have nothing to do with name based recording and it shouldn't required to know the name of the program to record. If I scheduled a manual timer to do the recording daily from 6:00AM to 8:00AM, then I would expect to see 2 hours of recording every day. But this is not happening, the recording stops after 2 days!

Dishnetwork is a reputable company, but it is so upset to see them release a not yet fully tested software.

Anyway, I hope dishnetwork can have a better QA testing process for their future releases. Also, it would be nice if they can allow us to select the version of the software to download via the system menu, so we can always rollback to an ealier version if something goes wrong.


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## ryank808 (Jan 14, 2005)

SimpleSimon said:


> I don't think it was ever ON 119.


It was, the EEPG was originally formatted just for the DishPlayer (DISH+WebTV) and it was transmitted off of 119. (The DISHPlayer was out before there even was a DISH 500). There was much outrange when due to questionable bandwidth reasons, and the lack of popularity of the DishPlayer the DP EPG (EEPG) was moved to 110, many people were pissed, you can read about that all over the 'net, E* offered all the DPlayer people a Dish 500 upgrade for free. Later the Non-MS DVRs and modern recievers with multi-day guides reused the MS guide already uplinked.



SimpleSimon said:


> No he won't - the retailer is the one that gets the shaft when you drop service within the first year.


In my case my retailer is Charlie (1-800-333-DISH), I ordered direct.


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## BuckHorn (Feb 29, 2004)

I'm having a different problem with NBR. Have been attempting to use the ONCE feature for recording, but when I select a one hour show it nearly always records 2 hours and includes the next scheduled one hour of programming. What am I doing wrong? I select ONCE and then CREATE TIMER, but when I go to playback I have two hours recorded.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

nychgan said:


> I think this is clearly a bug in the software. *Dishnetwork should roll out a new patch to fix this problem as soon as possible because a lot of people are expericing the same problem.*
> 
> The EEPG guide downloaded by my DVR only has 2 days of programming guide. Regardless of how many days of information the EEPG guide contains, a good software should be smart enough to update the schedule after each download of the EEPG guide.
> 
> ...


ROFLMAO. And crying at the same time because you are so riight, and it will so never happen.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

ryank808 said:


> It was, the EEPG was originally formatted just for the DishPlayer (DISH+WebTV) and it was transmitted off of 119. (The DISHPlayer was out before there even was a DISH 500). There was much outrange when due to questionable bandwidth reasons, and the lack of popularity of the DishPlayer the DP EPG (EEPG) was moved to 110, many people were pissed, you can read about that all over the 'net, E* offered all the DPlayer people a Dish 500 upgrade for free. Later the Non-MS DVRs and modern recievers with multi-day guides reused the MS guide already uplinked.


I stand corrected. :eek2: 


ryank808 said:


> In my case my retailer is Charlie (1-800-333-DISH), I ordered direct.


Good!


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## ryank808 (Jan 14, 2005)

Has anyone officially reported this to the bug department? I know at one time I found a bug reporting web page, but I can't seem to find it anymore. I haven't bothered calling customer support about this, I know it won't do any good, they seem to be clueless on more complex non-transactional/non-basic troubleshooting like this.

I'm also wondering if this is an always reproducible problem? I know it is for me, I've NEVER gotten a timer to work for more than 2 days-- after NBR was implemented. Anyone else only looking at 119 have this problem (always or intermittently?), it also looks like even some DISH 500 people have this problem but only intermittently?.

And, confirming what is probably fact, if you have a DISH 500 and unplug the 110 line and reboot the box, you'll only get a 44-hour guide (which will never work with NBR...)?


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## BobaBird (Mar 31, 2002)

ryank808 said:


> It was, the EEPG was originally formatted just for the DishPlayer (DISH+WebTV) and it was transmitted off of 119. (The DISHPlayer was out before there even was a DISH 500).


The DP's guide was not known as the EEPG, that came later. The 7100 was released so soon before Dish500 that I was surprised that it came with what is now known as Dish300.


> There was much outrange when due to questionable bandwidth reasons, and the lack of popularity of the DishPlayer the DP EPG (EEPG) was moved to 110, many people were pissed, you can read about that all over the 'net, E* offered all the DPlayer people a Dish 500 upgrade for free. Later the Non-MS DVRs and modern recievers with multi-day guides reused the MS guide already uplinked.


Almost, but not quite. The DISHPlayer 7-day guide on 119 was from TV Data. The 44-hour guide used by other Dish receivers (and the DP when a d/l was forced) is from Tribune. The discrepencies between the guides was believed to be a source of some of the DP's problems. The DP's EPG was not moved to 110, it was discontinued. Dish got a new 9-day EEPG from Tribune for its home-grown 501 which never used the MS/WebTV/TVData guide. The DP was later reprogrammed to retrieve the EEPG from 110 and DP owners were offered a free Dish500 upgrade because the EEPG was not, and never was, available from 119.


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## ryank808 (Jan 14, 2005)

I just don't understand why they would put the guide for their core services (AT 120) on a different satellite that obviously not everyone's going to be able to receive (look at all the E* customers pre-1999 or so before DISH 500 was invented, does Charlie really want to spend $100-200 to upgrade them all when he doesn't really have to, and of course the people with a blocked view of 110, and poor people like me in Hawaii, and Alaska)... Is it a plot to coerce everyone to DISH 500?

I think each satellite should carry a full 9-day guide for all the channels on itself, if you have 2 or more satellites the receiver could combine the data from the two or more satellite-specific EPGs to form the unified EPG we see on the screen. Data for spotbeamed locals could be transmitted from their respective spotbeams.

Also, it wouldn't seem that an EPG which is just a bunch of text wouldn't take up that much bandwidth, especially condsidering that it's not a real time service and it doesn't have any sort of "due date" where any certain amount of data throughput has to be acheived for the service to work (they could reduce the bitrate of the guide to a few kilobits a second and it'd still work, it'd just take longer for the guide to download)--there seems to be quite a few things they could trash on 119 already, the infomercial (BTV Business Info) channel, NAHUS, UCTV, RDTV anyone, maybe the Dish Ticket channels with the elevator music playing 99% of the time, I'm not saying kill these completely but they all seem more like 110, or 61.5, or 148, or 157  kind of things to me. Very likely a plot to D500 everybody.


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## BobaBird (Mar 31, 2002)

That first paragraph makes an _excellent_ point, and I had overlooked your location as being the source of your ire. One question: when this "plot" is carried out, will the Dish500s be delivered by black helicopters? 

I have to disagree though on the EPG not being a real time service. If you don't have a DVR or a newer receiver with expanded memory, you don't want to have to wait over a minute for the guide to fill in.

Back to topic.


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## ryank808 (Jan 14, 2005)

Good point about the EPG. I was thinking that all receivers downloaded/cached the EPG nightly at 3 am into memory. Makes sense that the old recievers don't do that, memory used to be expensive. The guide must be horribly slow on the old models if it has to load all the information off of the satellite every time the EPG is accessed.


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## ryank808 (Jan 14, 2005)

Any news on this? Stupid DISH just halfed the usefulness of my DVR overnight with their shoddy software downgrade.


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## nychgan (Feb 1, 2005)

ryank808 said:


> Any news on this?


Hi ryank808,

My DVR522 EPG guide download problem is fixed.

The problem was because the installation guy installed a wrong switch (DP34) for my dish. In order to get the 9-day EPG guide, I need a switch that can receive signals from 4 different satellite locations. Unfortunately, the DP34 only supports a max of 3 satellites.

I called dishnetwork and they replaced the DP34 switch with DP44 last week. Now, the EPG guide and name based recording both works perfectly without any problem.

As as side note, you can check the model of your switch using the the "check switch" screen.


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## ryank808 (Jan 14, 2005)

I'm surprised the switch has anything to do with it? As a sidenote my cheap installer basically installed a DIRECTV system, Dish Network branded 24" dish, but a generic LNB, marked "compatible with DIRECTV Para Todos and DIRECTV Multi-Satellite", and a generic "ZINWELL" sat. switch (http://www.dishstore.net/product_info.php?cPath=52&products_id=145). Oddly enough on his work form/receipt that he left here, there was a list of things he installed (switch, dish, LNB, etc.) and 2 columns for each item DP (DishPro) or Legacy, he checked DP for everything although obviously my system isn't, didn't know what DP meant at the time.

Can't help but wonder if he gave me this cheap generic equipment and kept the high-quality E* mfgr'd equipment that was meant for me, and if'll I run into trouble when I cancel and have to return the LNB and switch.

As for the NBR problem it appears to be mostly because the lack of availability of the EEPG, and aside from the fact that the EEPG SHOULD (damn D500 conspiracy) be on 119 in the first place, the software isn't smart enough (or bug-free enough) to work with only a 44-hour guide?


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## nychgan (Feb 1, 2005)

I totally agree that this is a software problem. 

The reason they replaced my switch was because all the 3 satellite inputs to DP34 were occupied by 119, 121 and 61.5. This is just their way of getting around the software bug.

Actually, I once asked them whether it is possible to get the 9-day EEPG guide by having the switch to use 110 instead of 61.5 since I don't watch any channels on 61.5. They said it is possible but they still proposed a switch replacement. (The switch replacement was free).


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## Bill R (Dec 20, 2002)

nychgan said:


> I totally agree that this is a software problem.
> 
> The reason they replaced my switch was because all the 3 satellite inputs to DP34 were occupied by 119, 121 and 61.5. This is just their way of getting around the software bug.


It is NOT a software problem. The extended guide for the 522 (and all DVRs) is only available from transponder 29 on the 110 satellite. The 522 has to have to extended guide in order for NBR to work. Since your receiver could not "see" that transponder you did not get the extended guide and the receive did not have the information it needed to record a program using NBR.

As you said, the "fault" is a result of a "uneducated" installer. All installers are suppose to know that ALL DVRs need to be able to "see" the 110 satellite and he should have installed a DP44 initially.


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## ryank808 (Jan 14, 2005)

Since when do all DVRs NEED to see 110? I'm in Hawaii and when I ordered my Dish Home Advantage plan only a 119 dish was installed. My DVR worked fine albeit without more than 44 hours of guide data until the NBR software update. Also, since when do only DVRs "need" 110, other reciever models, like the 322 also have 3 day(72-hour) EPGs that use part of the 110-TP 29 EEPG data.

The software problem is that the DVR software SHOULD recycle it's timer criterion and make the appropriate sub-timers more frequently (daily instead of weekly) so that it would work with whatever guide you have.


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## ryank808 (Jan 14, 2005)

Dead topic?


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## Debra808 (Mar 6, 2005)

I'm being tortured by the same problem as Ryank808.
I'm in Hawaii. I notice the reply's with solutions for our problem seemed to be out of state and don't have the limited access we have.
I've talked to the tech's many times. They say it software.
And we definately can't get more than 44 hours of guide till they change something.
Didn't we sign up for this service so we can set it and forget it.
Every single day I have to look at the guide and set my recording.
Go away from the home 3 days no one is there to set my timer.
A VCR from 1980 does a better job recording future events than what we have here. I think they should give us with the problem free programing till they fix the problem. Why are we being punished and they aren't for messing up?
Deb


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