Stupid Timers!

[Stacy A]

Went to "My Recordings" last night to bring up my latest recording of "Good Eats" and low and behold! there were about 10 "icarly" episodes recorded, back to back. I thought my two youngest daughters were the culprits, pressing the record button and being inattentive pressing through the "all episode" selection inadvertently recorded all these episodes. I went to the timers and found the icarly timer, but it was set for "new". I deleted the timer and went and deleted the recorded shows. Each of them were reported to be episodes from 09-08-07. That's strange. How would it record those if the timer was set to record "new" episodes? Plus the timer has been set up for several months now and no misfires have happened before that I know of.

 

[TheKrell]

I have this problem all the time with my Nick/Spongebob timers, as well as my Discovery/Beyond Tomorrow timers. When the guide gets messed up, even on episodes correctly reported as originally broadcast from some date in the remote past, nevertheless they get recorded anyhow.

 

[Jim S.]

There have been tons of old episodes showing up on "new only" timers on my 622 for the past few weeks. Unlike in the past when this would happen, a large number of them have complete and correct episode numbers, original air dates, and descriptions, so I have no idea why the hell it's doing that.

 

[M Sparks]

Whenever there is no description of the episode, it records it "just in case". By "no" description, I mean a generic one.

This happens every Monday with The Daily Show and Colbert Report. The daytime episodes on Monday are whatever the "best" episode from the week before is. They never actually show up properly in the listings...I'm guessing someone makes the call on Friday. So my 622 records both of them over and over all day long.

If it happened during a marathon, it may have been a "viewers choice" thing, or a "countdown" of the best episodes, so the eps had no descriptions. I've seen that happen with South Park.

 

[Rifleman62]

My 722 stops recording the last 15 seconds or so of the program. If you are recording the next program from the same channel, thoes 15 seconds show up before the next program starts. Any ideas?
Thanks

 

[maximum]

My 722 stops recording the last 15 seconds or so of the program. If you are recording the next program from the same channel, thoes 15 seconds show up before the next program starts. Any ideas?
Thanks

The first thing I would check is to make sure your timer isn't set to start recording 15 min before the scheduled start time.
Edit: Oh, you said "seconds" not minutes. 15 seconds is normal since the broadcast can easily go a few seconds or minutes past the timer.

 

[wetz73]

My 722 stops recording the last 15 seconds or so of the program. If you are recording the next program from the same channel, thoes 15 seconds show up before the next program starts. Any ideas?
Thanks

A lot of shows, especially on pay TV, run 15-30 seconds into the next hour to keep you from changing the channel on the hour. Set your timers to record an extra minute or two to pick them up. As long as you don't set them to record more than 3 minutes long, they won't bump a show right after either, which becomes an issue when a lot of folks set up a 5 minute longer preference.

 

[KKlare]

ABC especially likes to start early and finish late of the highly viewed shows with more commercial money, examples Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives. If you could easily send that show to a different timer it would help. But being Prime Time that is not always possibly with other shows to record and certainly is not easy. The overlap ranges from 15 seconds to 2 minutes. It means that you must view DH first if you want to delete it before you can watch and delete B&S following it.
-Ken

 

[MikeD-C05]

I just add 60 minutes to the end of Desperate Housewives to get Brothers& Sisters also. I also had to do this for Grey's Anatomy so we could get Private Practice as well. The second show never ends late because it runs till 10:00 pm central time . They wouldn't think of starting the news late. On Monday nights I set a manual timer from 7:00-9:00 pm because of the comedy shows on CBS. They always end at the start of the next show . This gets all of my shows without losing the endings. The only problem I found so far is coming next week. I had to also set a timer for Brothers & Sisters to get the movie next week since Desperate Housewives won't be on.

 

[DishSubLA]

On a past Tech Forum, Dan--the software man--confirmed that Dish changed the software to, in some cases, record episodes that were not new. He said that people were complaining that many "New" episodes were not recording, and people were--hot under the collar, shall we say. Dan explained that they felt they would err on the side of caution and allow the DVR to record some old shows so that it would be certain to record all the new shows. He said that if an old episode was recorded, we could all just erase it from the DVR recordings, as if dealing with a ton of MTV shows (or kiddie shows) was no big deal.

While several shows (channels) do, in fact, work perfectly recording only the "New" episodes, I have a number of others, especially on MTV and other channels, that will record a whole lot of the old episodes when the timer is set for "New."

Dish, you really need to fix this. I am tired of having to spend long periods manually "Skipping" several back to back episodes of Made, Parental Control, Room Raiders, The Real World--I'm talking about over 30 events to deal with at one time, not to mention the occasional episodes that are old and pop up on the Events list--and they all have the original air date as in the past. I often MUST waste my time manually "Skipping" the recordings because if I didn't it would consume all the remaining time on the internal HDD. Some other channels that also have the same problem are History International, BBC America. History and Nat Geo seem to be very reliable.

Dish, what is the point of setting a timer for "New Episodes" if it won't work? Dan, be the man and FIX THIS!

 

[RTCDude]

This because Dish's definition of "new" includes both "This program has never been broadcast before", and "I have never recorded this episode in a previously broadcast series before". Most folks who post here think of "new" as the first. But some folks think of "new" as just "I haven't seen that before". Dish had to come up with method to accomplish both kinds of recordings with just one setting. Unfortunately, recent frimware updates seem to be going overboard with the later kinds of recordings.

A seemly simple fix would be to add an additional modifier to the "new" setting to also include, or not include, "Unwatched Previous Episodes". That way you could set "new" to only record "truely" new programs, but stil be able retain the current behavior of adding older unwatched episodes. But if they did, I can just hear the whining now that "Dish is making it too complicated".

It's hard to make a single interface that satisfies both simple one-button users and more sophisticated power users. Whatever they do, one or another kind of user won't be happy.

 

[Stacy A]

After seeing that several others were having this problem too I figured it must have been a software update that was responsible. I only see it happen on the kiddie channels and occasionally Food Network, where I have "Good Eats" set to record new only - but every week or two it picks up an old one. But, unlike the kiddie channel shows it doesn't record every stinking episode back to back.

 

[mstregamer]

Just noticed mine doing the same NEVER had it happen before must be the new L617 software?

 

[Jim S.]

A lot of shows, especially on pay TV, run 15-30 seconds into the next hour to keep you from changing the channel on the hour. Set your timers to record an extra minute or two to pick them up. As long as you don't set them to record more than 3 minutes long, they won't bump a show right after either, which becomes an issue when a lot of folks set up a 5 minute longer preference.

It will certainly bump a show right after if it's on a different channel and you have both tuners in use, so it's not a cure-all.

On a past Tech Forum, Dan--the software man--confirmed that Dish changed the software to, in some cases, record episodes that were not new. He said that people were complaining that many "New" episodes were not recording, and people were--hot under the collar, shall we say. Dan explained that they felt they would err on the side of caution and allow the DVR to record some old shows so that it would be certain to record all the new shows. He said that if an old episode was recorded, we could all just erase it from the DVR recordings, as if dealing with a ton of MTV shows (or kiddie shows) was no big deal.

Well what they should do is sue Tribune for providing defective data. I'm sure they're paying for it, so they should insist that it's usable for its intended purpose.