OTA recordings breaking up...

SandFarmer

SatelliteGuys Pro
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Pub Member / Supporter
Mar 21, 2009
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The Beach.
This happened awhile ago and I forgot about it. But yesterday since the box, HwS, wouldn't let me do a timer for the local news after the SB, I sent a timer on the OTA channel. I went to watch it and it was all broken up with macro-blocking and the sound dropping. I checked the signal level, it showed 100% and the channel when viewed live was fine. Have I discovered a new "feature"? (snark)
 
This is a continuing problem that remarkably was fixed in U503 IIRC and then broken again in U504. My updates may be wrong but breaking a solved problem did happen and continue until now. A usually very reliable source here told me a "major update" in December would likely fix the problem again. It didn't and hasn't. I have lost all hope of recorded OTA ever playing without a glitch ever again.
 
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This is a continuing problem that remarkably was fixed in U503 IIRC and then broken again in U504. My updates may be wrong but breaking a solved problem did happen and continue until now. A usually very reliable source here told me a "major update" in December would likely fix the problem again. It didn't and hasn't. I have lost all hope of recorded OTA ever playing without a glitch ever again.

It is very frustrating. I really would enjoy watching some of the many local sub-channels, but this problem prevents any reasonable watching. I had a timer set sometime ago for my wife that I had pretty much forgotten about and assumed all was well. The season's over half over and I discovered all of the recordings are bad. <sshhhhh> Wish they could get this one figured out. Really eliminates the usefulness of the OTA Adapter I paid for!
 
It's worth $10/month per Locals subscriber for Dish NOT to fix it. I doubt we'll ever see reliable OTA on the Hopper 3 through the USB dongle.
 
It's worth $10/month per Locals subscriber for Dish NOT to fix it. I doubt we'll ever see reliable OTA on the Hopper 3 through the USB dongle.
But,
Isn't Dish pushing away from sat-locals for several reasons?
Retrans fees,
Market spotbeam bandwidth,
Free up 'locals' bandwidth for more channels with less compression and possible 4k channels.
 
I've got the same problem. My Tivo works OK with my OTA signal.

One thing I noticed my dual OTA module gets very hot, especially on the coax connector.

FYI, I tried to search for OTA posts but I couldn't get the search to work. I had to scroll through the posts until I found this one.
 
The ota on my HWS is ok, or it was, but trying to watch ota on my wireless joey is a challenge. Constant breakups, but it didn't use to be that way.
Leave it to Dish to break something that worked
 
The ota on my HWS is ok, or it was, but trying to watch ota on my wireless joey is a challenge. Constant breakups, but it didn't use to be that way.
Leave it to Dish to break something that worked
Tune your Hopper to the OTA channel, then go to your Joey and do the same and it will work fine... Until the next time it happens which is daily.
 
I've got the same problem. My Tivo works OK with my OTA signal.

One thing I noticed my dual OTA module gets very hot, especially on the coax connector.

FYI, I tried to search for OTA posts but I couldn't get the search to work. I had to scroll through the posts until I found this one.

I keep two USB fans on either side of mine. It was getting so hot, it stopped working. Fans do the trick, cool as a cucumber.
 
But,
Isn't Dish pushing away from sat-locals for several reasons?
Retrans fees,
Market spotbeam bandwidth,
Free up 'locals' bandwidth for more channels with less compression and possible 4k channels.
Dish will never get everyone to willingly unsubscribe from the locals. For some people OTA is not an option. Others don't want to deal with an antenna. So for those folks, Dish will continue to provide locals, meaning they'll never free up bandwidth.
 
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Dish will never get everyone to willingly unsubscribe from the locals. For some people OTA is not an option. Others don't want to deal with an antenna. So for those folks, Dish will continue to provide locals, meaning they'll never free up bandwidth.
Not entirely true. Dish can free up some bandwidth by changing the compression / encoding of the locals to be more efficient, just like the national channels. Of course, since each spotbeam only covers a very limited area, I would hope that Dish uses the bandwidth being freed up on the spotbeams to add more subchannels to the local package in each market. :)
 
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I just contacted Dish last week about this. They told me there is no such problem.
I called to do the "cancel thing" and in the course of the conversation this came up and all I got was silence. So I reiterate the issue and I got a mumbled BS reply that really didn't answer the question.

Not to mention that one of the OTA adapters has died. Need to do something to get it replaced.
 
Not entirely true. Dish can free up some bandwidth by changing the compression / encoding of the locals to be more efficient, just like the national channels. Of course, since each spotbeam only covers a very limited area, I would hope that Dish uses the bandwidth being freed up on the spotbeams to add more subchannels to the local package in each market. :)
True. I was more commenting on PPs thought of Dish doing away with locals altogether to free up that bandwidth. I don't think that will happen.
 

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