File transfer benchmarks / advice

[bookworm370]

Wow, how did you manage to get a 1-on-1 video call with their VP of H3 UI? I would love to be on that call! I have only been on the Hopper 3 for a couple of months, and some things really suck compared to the VIPs (I am a 25 year customer).

I got an email (which I thought might be phishing) but confirmed with a call. I dunno, other than I beat you by about three years! Most likely from my LI profile and background.

Cross your fingers that they take 1/4 of what I suggested into consideration.

 

[Almighty1]

I got an email (which I thought might be phishing) but confirmed with a call. I dunno, other than I beat you by about three years! Most likely from my LI profile and background.

Cross your fingers that they take 1/4 of what I suggested into consideration.

Was this one where you got paid or rewarded or just one that didn't give anything in return? For the later, I would do it only if it was short and regardless if they were good or not, I would still give them bad ratings because without it, they will not have improvements. Comcast has something similar but more of a survey type thing but each survey, you get points which can be redeemed for PayPal cash among other rewards. If it was some serious issue with DISH that effects my service, then I would write to the Corp executives at DISH by email who would resolve it right away by crediting and/or sending out a tech which happened recently and also include the feedback as well.

 

[Almighty1]

I had just thought of something. With the external HDD's that are sold as one unit, not the enclosures or SATA to USB cables which people connect their own internal HDDs to, wouldn't the other reason for the even slower speeds compared to the later be the hardware encryption that is part of the EHDD so basically the Hopper 3 has it's encryption slowing things down and then the EHDD also has it's own internal encryption which would slow things down even more. That thought occured because I remembered Western Digital 2.5" and 3.5" External HD's and probably Seagate too all mention they do like 256-bit hardware encryption which I happened to have seen a few days ago.

 

[ppappas]

I got an email (which I thought might be phishing) but confirmed with a call. I dunno, other than I beat you by about three years! Most likely from my LI profile and background.

Cross your fingers that they take 1/4 of what I suggested into consideration.

I wish I could get in touch with this VP because I just found what I consider to be a very serious problem with the Hopper and its DVR capability. It does not deal correctly with movie recordings with the same name but are different versions. For example, I have all three versions of Carrie recorded but only one can be seen and played on the Hopper. The tile shows there are three recordings but only one is accessible. I have a dozen movies like this recorded and my VIP 722 was fine with them.

 

[Almighty1]

I wish I could get in touch with this VP because I just found what I consider to be a very serious problem with the Hopper and its DVR capability. It does not deal correctly with movie recordings with the same name but are different versions. For example, I have all three versions of Carrie recorded but only one can be seen and played on the Hopper. The tile shows there are three recordings but only one is accessible. I have a dozen movies like this recorded and my VIP 722 was fine with them.

You can write to these by email:
Primary Contact
Charles McKay
Head of Executive Escalations
9601 S. Meridian Blvd.
Englewood, CO 80112
(720) 514-7732
Charles.McKay@dish.com

Secondary Contact
Melissa Gonzalez
Vice President - Customer Care
9601 S. Meridian Blvd
Englewood, CO 80112
melissa.gonzalez@dish.com

Kevin Covell
Senior Vice President
9601 S. Meridian Blvd
Englewood, CO 80112
kevin.covell@dish.com

or even "Charlie" himself if his e-mail address still works, it worked in 2016 so not sure about now at charlie.ergen@dishnetwork.com

 

[bookworm370]

I wish I could get in touch with this VP because I just found what I consider to be a very serious problem with the Hopper and its DVR capability. It does not deal correctly with movie recordings with the same name but are different versions. For example, I have all three versions of Carrie recorded but only one can be seen and played on the Hopper. The tile shows there are three recordings but only one is accessible. I have a dozen movies like this recorded and my VIP 722 was fine with them.

There is no need to contact any VP who will tell you that the function has been there since day one. But, to your base concern, Yes, you can.

Open the one that says Carrie, then look at the above tabs. You will see a tab called (Episodes) allowing you to choose which one you want to play. You can scroll down and see the program info for each Carrie movie, when it was recorded, the synopsis, etc.

That feature has been there since EHDs were released for years now.

I have a few Robin Hood (the Kevin Costner version and the original), Journey to the Center of the Earth movies and The Day the Earth Stood Still. They show as a single tile, but if you open it, you can select which one you want to play from the 2nd Episodes tab to review and play whichever version you want.

Maybe just ask here before you start to call in bug issues for something that is not a but. Some old users and experts here probably know more than any random C/S person you get on the phone.

BTW, it's also handled the same way on the internal drive as well.

 

[Almighty1]

Mines seems to be a random bug using your Carrie example on the Hopper 3. There was a time once or twice in the last year where before I click on Carrie, using that name only as a example where it will show 3 episodes of Carrie as I usually move things daily and when I first visit the folder, it will show all 3 episodes in the list but the box reboots on it's own without a warning and Carrie would still show the 3 but when I open Carrie, it will only show 2 episodes and it's not in Trash so I guess the question is what happened to that missing episode which the box still shows in the total but nowhere to be found. It could be the episode is taking up space on the internal HDD but is not displaying it so I can either watch, move or delete it. So in my case, because it's only 2 episodes, all the episodes are there compared to if one had more episodes that will fit, then one can still scroll past to show the other episodes that don't fit the screen.

When you mentioned the workaround earlier, I was not able to get it working because basically yesterday for example, I selected one title which had 2 recordings of the same episode that was recorded at two different times on the same day. I selected it and then selected watch tv within seconds after I can see the green bar start and it showed the estimated time and normally the HDD led is blinking when it's reading or writing during the first minute but after ten minutes when I checked again since it usually only takes 3-4 minutes, it turned solid white so I selected the external HDD and the progress bar was blank and when I clicked on stop, it showed the green bar at some % and the remaining time but unlike a normal stop where it sends it back to what one was doing before selecting the EHDD, there are no other options to access the EHDD. I would get the previous if I were to back out and select the EHDD again. Or did you mean I have to playback a recording on both internal and EHDD before doing the transfer and would I need to do it on only the target EHDD only or all three EHDD's?

But in pppappas case, hopefully he really can still see all three with your suggestion and not really only have one accessible. That's why sometimes for things like these, it really needs a video capture of the event so others will understand what exactly is happening.

 

[Almighty1]

I did manage to get the workaround working as bookworm370 mentioned in post #12 File transfer benchmarks / advice in this thread earlier today when I tried to transfer a single1.5 hr SD recording from the Hopper 3 Internal HDD to the EHDD and it said "Transfer successful with errors", not sure why they even call it successful when it's a failure so what I did afterwards without restarting the Hopper 3 was did a playback of a random recording on the internal HDD and all external HDDs which I have 3 x 2TB and then it transferred successfully without any errors as I left it on the transferring screen and watched the progress meter from 0% to completion so maybe the best way to do it is to after the box is just to use the procedure a few minutes before doing any transfers.

 

[bookworm370]

I did manage to get the workaround working as bookworm370 mentioned in post #12 File transfer benchmarks / advice in this thread earlier today when I tried to transfer a single1.5

Glad it worked for you. As to why that sequence works, I have no idea other than forcing a buffer or cache flush that causes the error in the first place. That's why a Hopper restart also fixes it as everything starts from scratch.

I know it's a PITA, but when you are recording something already, someone else on a Joey is watching something, and you don't want to disturb them, then it's either wait for a restart slot or do the merry-go-round selection and playback until the gum gets cleaned out.

Sorry I don't have anything more specific for you as I know not the internal coding but at least there is a bass-ackwards workaround.

 

[Almighty1]

Glad it worked for you. As to why that sequence works, I have no idea other than forcing a buffer or cache flush that causes the error in the first place. That's why a Hopper restart also fixes it as everything starts from scratch.

I know it's a PITA, but when you are recording something already, someone else on a Joey is watching something, and you don't want to disturb them, then it's either wait for a restart slot or do the merry-go-round selection and playback until the gum gets cleaned out.

Sorry I don't have anything more specific for you as I know not the internal coding but at least there is a bass-ackwards workaround.

For viewing the recording on EHDD, does it actually need to be done on all EHDDs or only the one the transfer(s) is going to. In my case, the issue was right after the Hopper was rebooted for updates and the first time I actually the errors message, usually the process will just hang instead. I guess this is one case where a Unix type of OS device is more unstable than Windows.

I actually only have nothing more than one Hopper 3 so the bigger issue is I want to make sure the EHDD is available since should I get that full space recording or even before that happens, I can transfer recordings to the EHDD first as I have plenty of timers and most of the time when I am available, there are one or more timer(s) scheduled so hopefully some problem doesn't happen before I can find a time at it is not recording to restart assuming I will not be doing something else.

But regardless, thanks for providing the workaround. Now unless it's possible, I wished there was a way to change recordings so it shows completely unwatched even so instead of showing 1 hour 29 mins remaining on a 1 hour and 30 minutes ecording, it would just show the full 1 hour and 30 minutes remaining.

 

[Almighty1]

I have been testing the workaround some more, it seems that I no longer have the problem where the transfer process will hang as now all I will do is get errors either immediately or within a minute after starting the transfer as it's easy to tell if there will be errors because on the transfer progress screen, it will say transferring but will never start as you will see the green bar in the attempting to start status for maybe 10 seconds and never makes it to show the time remaining. Anyways, if there are errors with the transfer, one only needs to playback any recording on the destination EHDD only where you want to transfer the recordings to and no recordings need to be played on the internal HDD or other EHDD's for the workaround to work so the real buffer that is filled up is really the target EHDD's.

 

[Almighty1]

It seems like after upgrading to H364 from H363 on the Hopper 3, the workaround no longer works. What I noticed was ever since the first time I got the workaround working with I think H358, even when I forget to do it, instead of the transfer process hanging like before which requires restarting the Hopper 3 before the target EHDD's will be seen again by the Hopper 3, I would get the Transfer process is complete with errors which basically means nothing was moved at the end where the workaround will work simply by doing a playback on the target destination EHDD for a second or more and the transfer will work. So the good thing is I never saw the transfer process hanged again even when I forget to do the workaround.
With H364, after selecting transfer, it will try to do the estimating time for transfer where there are the green bars moving from left to right and then about 10 seconds later, it would say Transfer complete with errors with the progress green bar 100%. And using the workaround does not work whether if it's just playback on the destination EHDD or if it's playback on the Hopper 3 internal HDD and the 3 EHDD's, it will still result in after selecting transfer and it will try to do the estimating time for transfer where there are the green bars moving from left to right and then about 10 seconds later, it would say Transfer complete with errors with the progress green bar 100%. The only workaround that worked is to disconnect the target EHDD which will show the disconnected message and connect the EHDD again which will show the connected message a minute later. And then the transfer will work.