This is a new spin on the gripe I have seen in a number of threads about losing the beginning or end of programs. It appears to me that most of the time I am missing a minute or so off the end of some programs. This causes me to wonder if it could be an issue with the time on the receiver. Just wondering if there any merit to this idea and if Dish can do something to fix it.
The clock on our guides/Dish boxes is SPOT ON Naval Observatory Master Clock. The problem is that once Dish receives the programming signals at the up-link, it takes time to route those signals to the encoder, then actually encode all the "channels" together into ONE mux, then beam it 20,000+ miles out to space, bounce it back down 20,000+ miles back down to your ground station (reflector at home: your Dish system) and add to that time the fact that the digital stream is REALLY LONG these days and it takes more time for your Hopper or other Dish STB needs to decode then hold a frame in memory, wait for the next necessary frame while discarding most of the immediately following frames that are for other channels you are not attempting to tune to, along with waiting for other data (sometimes a key necessary for decryption) before the box can spit out the first full picture and sound to your TV. What results is about a 10-15 second delay in "real time." This is only a problem if you are recording a channel that has programming right up to the very last second on the clock such as History, and then immediately starts the next program because this will cause you to miss the last 15 seconds of programming cutting off the narrator or ceasing recording just before the cliff hanger. However, on a channel such as BBC America where they have a show end a good 30 seconds before the top or bottom of the our, then roll credits and promos in the last 30 seconds, you will never have a recording lose the final moments because the show does NOT go all the way to the very last second because it would end with a good 15 seconds to spare. I believe most of the time is spent during the real-time/on the fly encoding and muxing stage of the data before it is up-linked (quite a bit of processing power and time needed when dealing with a fair number of HD channels and other data on a single transponder at MPEG4 ) and then the size of the resulting stream being the 2 biggest factors in the delay.
This has all been discussed before, and if Dish adjusts the clock to synch with the delay, then our OTA recordings are going to be cut off. Dish's response to any such inexactness to recordings is to adjust the Start Early and End Late options in our timers. I guess we live with it.
works swimmingly
