# DVR Features Disabled During Superbowl



## welchwarlock (Jan 5, 2005)

Ya got to love it. Another undocumented feature.

While recording the superbowl, you can not watch something you have already recorded, Tune a different channel, or even record another channel. It says "Your receiver is in Live Mode, would you like to terminate the current recording?"

Why do I have a dual tuner DVR if it won't let me use it? I called two other 921 owners, and the same thing. The NFL and Dish apparently now decides how I can and can not use my DVR.

I bought this unit with my money, it is not a leased unit, yet how I decide to use it is being limited by Dish Network and the NFL? 

If I cancel the superbowl recording I can then use the dual tuner.

For what it is worth, I was using the OTA tuner.

WTF? Over. Where is this limitation described in my manual?

WW


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Something you're doing wrong. I watched a recorded program for the first hour of the SB while it recorded so I cound watch the superbowl about 1 hour on delay. Thereby allowing me to skip through the commercials for awhile. No problems here. Owner limitation is not documented in the manual.


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## Alpaca Bill (Jun 17, 2005)

I paused it for almost 30 minutes while we ate dinner and then FF to catch up. Rewound several times to see plays again. No problems here.


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## welchwarlock (Jan 5, 2005)

It gets worse. I had stopped and started the recording, made 5 segments. First Half, Half Time, 2nd Half, Post Game, and then Gray's Anatomy. When I went to delete one of the segments to free up some space for the future, the DVR erased all 5 pieces.

I am glad that others did not have any problems, but something squirely was going on here. I am in the Dallas area, and like I said earlier, my other Dallas friends had the same problem about recording multiple Items at once during the superbowl.

Cheers,
WW


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## welchwarlock (Jan 5, 2005)

Don, what is "Live Mode?" I hadn't seen that message before.

R.C.


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

welchwarlock said:


> Don, what is "Live Mode?" I hadn't seen that message before.
> 
> R.C.


You mean the message in the upper right corner that pops up? I recall that happens here when you are recording and are watching at the same time and then try to skip ahead but you can't skip ahead to a time before it happens. You can only skip ahead when you are watching a point in the recording before the live time. If that's not what you meant, I don't know. I never saw the second part, you mentioned Would you like to terminate the recording now?

Oh, maybe you tried to move to a channel while recording an OTA channel and that channel was another OTA channel. You cannot do that because the 921 only has one OTA tuner.  Fundamental limitation of all Dish Network receivers. To watch one OTA channel while recording another you MUST use a receiver like the HD TIVO that has two OTA tuners.

Trust me, the NFL doesn't care that you live in Dallas.  But the 921 does care if you or anyother person (no matter where they live) tries to do something that the receiver was not designed to do, ie try to tune more than one OTA channel at the same time.


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## welchwarlock (Jan 5, 2005)

This is what I did. While watching the game on the OTA tuner, I hit Record. And a windows popped up and asked if I wanted to record to the end of the program, and I said OK.

Later I went to the menu and selected another show from the guide (A non OTA channel) and pressed record.

This is when the window popped up and said "You are in Live Mode, and must stop the current recording". I pressed cancel and went back to the game.

I then went to my list of recorded shows to try to play back something else while it was recording, and I got the same "You are in Live Mode" window.

When I mention the "You are in Live Mode" window, I do not mean the four letter text that says live in the upper right. It is a window prompt with 3 choices. It says something like "You are in Live Mode. Do you want to stop Recording?".

Basically, if while it was recording the game it would not allow me to watch or record anything else. Whenever you tried to do anything it would prompt with the "You are in Live Mode" window.

For clarification, I am not talking about the prompt that comes up when you have it delayed and it warns you that you will loose the buffer by changing channels.

WW


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## gregmisc (Jan 10, 2005)

WW,
I had this same problem last week. The 921 was acting like it had only one tuner no matter what I tried. It would not let me change the PIP windows either, they were both on the channel that was recording. The 921 showed only one recording going. Only when I stopped the recording did it let me change channels and go back to working correctly.

This happened to me only the one time. I didn't have any problems with the SuperBowl.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

welchwarlock said:


> Don, what is "Live Mode?" I hadn't seen that message before.


"Live Mode" is the message you get when you are recording manually; you have told the DVR that you will press the stop button when you are finished recording. I would guess that the people that were having problems all recorded in this manner. If they had set a timer, there wouldn't have been these problems. The disadvantage is that there is no way to isolate the particular phases of the game.

From what I can gather, the correct way to handle this would be to set up a timer using the guide or from the begin time to 4.5 hours later and then manually stopping the timer when the proceedings were over. If you wanted Grey's Anatomy, you would have to keep the whole 5.5 hour bundle as there was no way of knowing when Grey's Anatomy was going to start.


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## welchwarlock (Jan 5, 2005)

gregmisc said:


> WW,
> I had this same problem last week. The 921 was acting like it had only one tuner no matter what I tried. It would not let me change the PIP windows either, they were both on the channel that was recording. The 921 showed only one recording going. Only when I stopped the recording did it let me change channels and go back to working correctly.
> 
> This happened to me only the one time. I didn't have any problems with the SuperBowl.


Thanks Greg and Harsh, this is the problem I was having.

Apparently it gets into modes where it only can deal with one tuner at a time. As with other problems, I guess this problem will be addressed in an upcoming hardware release...622vip?

WW


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## Jim Parker (Aug 12, 2003)

Welch
I had the same thing happen to my 921 4 days ago. I manualy started the recorder at 6:40 for a program that ran from 6:30 to 7:30. When I tried to change channels, I got the same message you did. I tried several times, same results. The channel being recorded and the ones I tried to change to were not OTA. No other recordings were taking place.

Then I noticed that there were 2 other timers set to fire at 7:00. That means that there would have been 3 recordings taking place between 7 and 7:30. The 921 did not give any error messages that I would have 3 recordings going. Pretty poor error trapping in the 921.

Could the same thing have happened to you?


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## Skates (Apr 15, 2004)

The same thing happened to me yesterday, although in my case, I didn't use any DVR functions until after the game was over. It acted like I only had a single tuner.

Also, when I went to set a DVR timer, I clicked on "Create", the button turned yellow like it always does, but...nothing happened. Tried it several times in a row and...nothing. I never had that happen before.

So, I did the usual. I did a power-plug reboot. After that it worked fine.


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## Alpaca Bill (Jun 17, 2005)

This has happened to me several times as well in the past. No other timers and only trying to record the current show (non-OTA). The 921 seemed to forget it had another sat tuner it could use no matter what I tried. After a hard reboot, everything went back to normal...or as normal as you can get with the flaky 921.


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## langlin (Apr 8, 2005)

If you are watching "live" and recording the same channel, the 921 uses both tuners, If you want to change channels it will ask to stop the "live" recording to use that tuner for the new channel. You simply say yes and it will show the new channel and continue to record the first channel. You must remember the 921 "records" everything you watch and that is independent of the formal recording process. This is not a bug but a limitation of tuners to use.


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## Larry Caldwell (Apr 4, 2005)

welchwarlock said:


> This is what I did. While watching the game on the OTA tuner, I hit Record. And a windows popped up and asked if I wanted to record to the end of the program, and I said OK.
> 
> Later I went to the menu and selected another show from the guide (A non OTA channel) and pressed record.
> 
> ...


I get the "Live Mode" notice quite often, usually when I am trying to switch to watching a recorded program. I am supposed to be able to watch a recorded program while recording two shows, but the 921 sometimes no longer lets me do that. It is a bug that showed up with the 273 software release.

One work-around that sometimes seems to work is to go to the timer list and delete the next timer to fire. Twice the 921 has then allowed me to continue recording 2 shows and watch a pre-recorded program. Three times it hasn't helped. Go figure.


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## Jim Parker (Aug 12, 2003)

The several times that I tried to make it work, saying yes stopped the recording, so I had several short recordings on the disk. The fact that I would have had 3 programs recording may or may not have been the cause of it. 

That I did not get an error message might be due to starting the recording with the 'record' button instead of selecting from the guide.

Another bug that occured after SB40 was that I set a timer to record Gray's Anatomy and added 29 minutes to it (should have recorded from 6:00 to 7:29). The timer did not add the 29 minutes (one other timer was set to fire at 7:00, so it should have worked). I checked it at 7:05 and discovered that the 29 minutes was not added. I hit the record button for Wheel of Fortune and got the last of Gray's with no problem.

I had to power button reboot Friday and twice Saturday. Sheesh, the 921 works fine for a few weeks, then all kinds of different problems crop up. :nono2:


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## ntexasdude (Jan 23, 2005)

Once again I experienced but no such problems but I didn't try the exact same sequence as welchwarlock. I was out of town until about 7:15 pm on Superbowl Sunday. I had set 2 advanced timers for the game, both OTA, one for channel 007 SD and one for 007-01 HD. I recorded both SD and HD in case one failed for some reason. Anyway, I started watching the game 2 hours late, from the beginning and switched back and forth a few times to look at the difference btween SD and HD.

My 921 worked flawlessly and once again saved the day.:icon_da:


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

The posts in this thread are a bit confusing. The 921 has only one OTA tuner and that is all you can tune is one channel at a time. If you did tune to two different channels, then one may have been an OTA channel with the OTA tuner but the other must have been a SAT LIL channel. Or, you tuned to two different sat LIL channels. It is not possible to have a single tuner tuned to two different channels at the same time whether recording or not. My earlier posts may not have accurately addressed the issue because I made the assumption that the person with problems was tuning the OTA single tuner. In this and other threads, I sometimes get the impression people don't know what channel they are tuning to. Off air or LIL satellite locals. It does make a difference in what your options are.


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## Skates (Apr 15, 2004)

I can only relay my personal experience.

I was recording a non-OTA channel (CBSHD). I was also watching ABC - OTA right after the super bowl and wanted to record "Grey's Anatomy". My intent was to let those programs record and watch something from my DVR menu that was previously recorded. So far so good.

So, at the beginning of Grey's Anatomy, I hit "record" and then chose "record to the end of the current program". As soon as I did that, I got "the request can only be carried out in live mode - do you want to stop the current recording?"

In my opinion, that shouldn't happen. There was no reason I should have had to terminate recording #1 to get it to record #2, especially since I was tuned to that channel at the time.

As far as whether it's a bug or just the way the 921 operates, I don't know. I seldom record anything manually.


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## ntexasdude (Jan 23, 2005)

DonLandis said:


> The posts in this thread are a bit confusing. The 921 has only one OTA tuner and that is all you can tune is one channel at a time. If you did tune to two different channels, then one may have been an OTA channel with the OTA tuner but the other must have been a SAT LIL channel.....


You are correct Don. In my post I meant to say I was tuned to one HD OTA and one Sat LIL. Sorry for the confusion.


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## Michael P (Oct 27, 2004)

Welch, Do you subscribe to the LIL's (i.e. did you have guide data other than "Local Programming" for the OTA channel you were watching & recording at the same time)?

I learned (the hard way) the only safe way to record OTA is to set a manual timer. 

As far as stopping and starting, you may have created what I will call for lack of an acceptable term a "stacked recording". A stacked recording is several programs within ONE program. Say you set a timer manually for 3 hours. The DVR list only shows one program inthe menu, however once you clilck on that recording if there were several different programs in the guide you may see all their titles on a second menu. This also happens sometime on timers that start 1 minute early and end 3 minutes late. You get the correct title (hopefully) in the main DVR menu, but inside that are the 3 programs that got recorded (1 minute of "program A", 60 minutes of "Program B (usuallly to one you wanted), and 3 minutes of "Program C"). If you tried to delete "Program C" for example, it will take the whole "suite" of programs away as they are linked as a single recording.


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## tnsprin (Mar 16, 2003)

This bug is ancient and has been reported in the 921 Bug report forum. Seems to hit more often when using an OTA channel, but can also happen with a satellite timer.

And of course it depends on other unknown factors.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Skates said:


> So, at the beginning of Grey's Anatomy, I hit "record" and then chose "record to the end of the current program". As soon as I did that, I got "the request can only be carried out in live mode - do you want to stop the current recording?"


Do you subscribe to locals? If not, there may be no "end of program" even if there are partitions in the guide. Actually, there may have been no entry for Grey's Anatomy due to the nature of its time slot (immediately after the Superbowl).


> In my opinion, that shouldn't happen.


There are a lot of unique things at play with this situation. The other factor on my system was that the Superbowl looked like it was scheduled through to the end of the hour, so your recording of Grey's Anatomy should have stopped on the hour, 11pm EST, instead of 11:35pm EST where it actually ended.


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## Skates (Apr 15, 2004)

Harsh - on your first question, yes, I do subscribe to locals.

On your second observation, you are correct - the guide was out of sync. That was why I set a manual timer. And actually, I realize I made a mistake in my last post. The option I chose was the one that allowed me to add extra time to the recording, and it was after I did that that the error came up. Sorry for the confusion.


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## fwampler (Dec 2, 2005)

langlin said:


> If you are watching "live" and recording the same channel, the 921 uses both tuners, If you want to change channels it will ask to stop the "live" recording to use that tuner for the new channel. You simply say yes and it will show the new channel and continue to record the first channel. You must remember the 921 "records" everything you watch and that is independent of the formal recording process. This is not a bug but a limitation of tuners to use.


Thanks for the great explaination. I always wondered what was happening. It's nice to to know you can answer yes and the recording will continue.


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## Larry Caldwell (Apr 4, 2005)

fwampler said:


> Thanks for the great explaination. I always wondered what was happening. It's nice to to know you can answer yes and the recording will continue.


That is not true. If you answer yes, the channel you are watching will stop recording.


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

There are four conditions WRT OTA guide data-

1. Subscribe to locals and don't get the guide data
2. Subscribe to locals and get guide data
3. Don't subscribe and don't get guide data
4. Don't subscribe to locals and get guide data.


I fall in the #4 category and it seems this is the smallest group who have admitted this condition. Most are in 2 or 3. If you are in 1 or 3 you cannot set a timer based on a guide entry even if there are breaks but no data. (So I've been told. In my #4 category, I have no problem using the guide to set a timer as it works just like the sat channels. 

Because of the abiove, it is not possibel to compare conditions for this issue unless the people reporting the condition all are from the same group of condition. eg. I cannot use LIL sat channels because I don't get them as I do not subscribe to them. Therefore I am restricted to one tuner for all my local station recordings People in category 2 have the most options to record and watch local channel stations using the guide to set timers.


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## welchwarlock (Jan 5, 2005)

Another Update. The problem goes away approximately halfway into the show. The same problem occured during the Grammy's last night, but after half of the show was over, you could tune to another channel or start watching a recorded show on the DVR. But during the beginning of the show, it says "You are In Live Mode" and would not allow the change...

WW


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## Larry Caldwell (Apr 4, 2005)

welchwarlock said:


> Another Update. The problem goes away approximately halfway into the show. The same problem occured during the Grammy's last night, but after half of the show was over, you could tune to another channel or start watching a recorded show on the DVR. But during the beginning of the show, it says "You are In Live Mode" and would not allow the change...
> 
> WW


Was there an upcoming timer at the beginning of the show that started recording, and after it started recording you could switch?


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## fwampler (Dec 2, 2005)

Larry Caldwell said:


> That is not true. If you answer yes, the channel you are watching will stop recording.


Interesting. Guess I'll have to check this out.


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