DVR Problem

[LoTech]

I recorded Hell on Wheels last night on AMC, and when I started the playback today it said that it recorded 1hour and 4 minutes. 5 minutes into playback the DVR said playback done and went back to the main screen. I tried it several times, and always the same thing. Any ideas?

 

[harshness]

Is there any reason to believe that you lost signal during the recording?

 

[LoTech]

No. Actually I already watched it while it was recording. My wife wanted to watch it tonight, and I'm getting this problem. After the message "Done with Playback" when it goes back to the DVR screen, it has the option to watch Live TV. I found this odd too.

 

[Bobby]

I recorded it last night and watched it this morning with no issues....

 

[Tampa8]

Not to jump to conclusions, but that is a sign of a bad sector of hard drive, and/or a failing hard drive. I would just delete it, and see if this occurs again, because there's always the chance it was a one time thing. If you have anything important might want to move them to an external hard drive, which since Dish does not charge for, you should anyway. (You buy the drive no fee from Dish)

 

[LoTech]

After doing some digging, I think I may have found the reason. I was recording on Tv2 which was previously tuned to an OTA channel. I've been having problems with the partial signal loss issue concerning OTA. Could this be the problem?

 

[KKlare]

Yes, the OTA does seem to mess up viewing and less so recordings.
If it is a bad sector, is it not best to just leave that and rename the file as Zbad or such?
That would block another recording over the spot--just an idea, no basis.
-Ken

 

[TG2]

OTA problems have created oddities like this .. but the bad sector is also likely..

when I've had one of these in the past.. I could skip past the bad spot some times... and it would continue.. those I think were just random glitches .. not an actual drive failure.

 

[LoTech]

It could be a bad sector, but the receiver is just 2 weeks old. I adjusted tv2 so the previous channel was not OTA, and I just recorded Castle for a test. The whole thing recorded fine. I guess I'll keep an eye on it to see if there are any other problems.

 

[dare2be]

I've had this happen on very rare occasions, on my previous 625 and I think once with my 722 since I got it in September. Each time I have cut my losses, delete it, and move on functioning normally.

 

[KKlare]

I was doing a major reordering of my collection and found 2 recordings that have bad spots.
They hang the replay and cannot be copied off the EHD. Same one for both.
One was 2 min from end and in the commercial overtime the other 57min from end.

I would speak for being able to truncate a recording on either end.
Cutting the end should require only a simple software option.
Cutting the front end would need finding the preceding full frame.
Let us do a little editing.

-Ken

 

[dare2be]

cutting or even splitting existing titles would be a great addition, one I have wanted for a while.

 

[KKlare]

Even better would be to remove commercials, not likely, but require more key frame finding.
Then again, I have/had a DVR that would flag them and skip over them on replay.
It mostly worked on its MPEG-1/2 data. Of course, I guess I have given up on DVDs.
-Ken

 

[LoTech]

I've had a couple DVD recorders with hard drives that allowed you to do a file system check and optimize the drive. I wonder why Dish DVRs don't have this option. If they are built on Linux, it shouldn't be too hard.

 

[harshness]

I've had a couple DVD recorders with hard drives that allowed you to do a file system check and optimize the drive. I wonder why Dish DVRs don't have this option. If they are built on Linux, it shouldn't be too hard.

checking and optimization is not something you can expect an DVR user to do so there's little point in making it a menu selection.

If you think about it, there's little point in tweaking the settings (optimization) as DISH has probably already figured that out for the very specific purpose DVRs are used for.

 

[TG2]

And if you hard power cycle the receiver ... ie pull the power .. it **SHOULD** do an FSCK *EVERY* time ...

When you pull the power .. the system doesn't have the chance to do a nice on the filesystem ... a "shutdown, flush cache, seek home, now reboot" .... so the drive state should come up as "dirty" and the FSCK should be mandatory.

I'm pretty sure I saw an FSCK counter in the counters data under one of the menus on my 722k ... there should be the same under most of them..

 

[Mike88]

Here's an earlier thread about this problem.
http://www.satelliteguys.us/dish-network-forum/255893-722k-recordings-getting-cut-off.html

It seems to happen to a few people once in a while. I had my 722k swapped with a new one and about a week later had the same problem. I've discussed this with Dish and my local installer. Dish said they were aware of the problem, and that was over a year ago. Obviously it's still around, but there does not appear too many posts about it lately. Maybe it's getting "less worse".

If you delete the corrupt recording you will find that you do not get back the same amount of recording time as if you deleted a similar program on the same channel. IOW the recording is not really all there, even though it says it is. At least that's what I've noticed. Or maybe whatever keeps track of the sectors is corrupt & does not recognize anything past a certain point.

Either way Dish's executive office told me over a year ago they were working on it. And yet it took only 4 days to get a man to the moon, and that was over 40 years ago.