Wally U815 DVR Recording Issue

[pattykay]

I have been detailing my issues with DVR functionality on the Wally in this thread: Wally U810 DVR Timers Issue
However, my sister has a specific issue with DVR recordings on her Wally, that I have been unable to duplicate on mine, so I thought I would start a brand-new thread about her issue. My sister's Wally has the new software U815. (I have repeatedly tried to force this update on my Wally through Diagnostics > Tools, but it always tells me that U814 is the most recent version.) With U815, all recordings from one specific channel on my sister's Wally are completely non-playable. We are in the Cleveland, Ohio locals market, and every show that my sister records from (satellite-delivered) WDLI channel 17 results in a black screen quickly followed by the Playback Complete pop-up every time she tries to play one of those recordings. Her recordings from any other channel all play just fine without any issues. She is connected to Eastern Arc, if that makes a difference.

WDLI is one of two local channels in our market that are only carried in standard-def by Dish. All of our other local channels are HD-only on Eastern Arc. So, this issue may be specific to standard-def locals. (She never records our other standard-def local channel, WRLM, so we have not checked to see if the issue affects that channel.) Using OTA instead of satellite is not an option for my sister, since she cannot receive the OTA signal from WDLI where she lives.

Watching Live TV on WDLI works just fine, so it is not a signal loss issue. (Or at least, it is not a signal loss issue on Tuner 1. There possibly could be an issue on Tuner 2, which is used for recording. However, the only thing that I can think of that would cause that would be a faulty separator. We have checked everything else that we can think of. Since the separator is built inside the Wally, fixing that would mean replacing the entire Wally.)

Since this is such an odd issue, I thought that it would be a good idea to post it here, to see if anyone has any thoughts on what the issue could be, or what can be done to try to fix it. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide. It is greatly appreciated.

 

[pattykay]

...

WDLI is one of two local channels in our market that are only carried in standard-def by Dish. All of our other local channels are HD-only on Eastern Arc. So, this issue may be specific to standard-def locals. (She never records our other standard-def local channel, WRLM, so we have not checked to see if the issue affects that channel.) ...

She just confirmed that the same problem that happens on WDLI also happens on WRLM channel 47. This would seem to confirm either something specific about satellite-delivered standard-def locals, or something to do with signal loss on that specific transponder on one tuner only. Live TV works on both channels, except for an issue with the Delayed Live TV buffer where rewind does not work properly. This issue is also specific to those two channels, so I am leaning toward a software issue of some kind.

 

[pattykay]

...My sister's Wally has the new software U815. (I have repeatedly tried to force this update on my Wally through Diagnostics > Tools, but it always tells me that U814 is the most recent version.) ...

This is interesting. I just hooked up a deactivated Wally that had not been used for awhile, and let it take a fresh software download. It now also has U814, just like my Wally, and it also is now saying that U814 is the most recent version available. Therefore, it looks like Dish has stopped rolling out the new U815 version for some reason, maybe due to issues like the one I am reporting in this thread.

So, I guess the next step would be to get this Wally activated on my sister's account, and see if U814 fixes the issue. There does not seem to be a way to get her Wally to go back to the old software, but I can at least try switching her to a different Wally with the old software. I knew there had to be some kind of workaround for this issue.

 

[pattykay]

I switched my sister over to the other Wally with U814. So far, she is still having the same problems with the Delayed Live TV buffer, on the same channels. Existing recordings from WDLI still have the same problem. In fact, it is slightly worse, since instead of going directly to the Playback Complete pop-up as soon as you start to play one (like the other Wally with U815 had been doing) it now stays on a black screen with the Pause symbol in the lower-right corner. Pressing the Play button then immediately takes it to the Playback Complete pop-up. There is still no way to get these recordings to actually play. So, at least we know that this issue is not specific to the U815 software, nor is it a hardware problem with that specific Wally. That still does not get us any closer to fixing the problem, though. The only thing left to do is wait for her timers on WDLI to start making new recordings, and see if those new recordings also still have this same issue.

 

[pattykay]

I switched my sister over to the other Wally with U814. ... The only thing left to do is wait for her timers on WDLI to start making new recordings, and see if those new recordings also still have this same issue.

New recordings made today with U814 still have the exact same issue that the old recordings did.

 

[pattykay]

Some progress. This morning, there was only one recording of The Listener from WDLI. (We had already deleted all of the old recordings of that series since they would not play.) When selecting that recording (or any other recording now) the Episodes screen comes up with "No Episodes Available" the first time we select it. After backing out and selecting it again, the Episodes screen would only show scrolling blue dots across the middle of the screen. After waiting for awhile, the Info screen for the episode finally came up, with a Watch button. Selecting that button, the episode actually plays properly. Rewind and Skip Back are also working properly now. Success! So, there has evidently been some work done on fixing this issue, but it is still not quite 100% fixed yet, as this seems like a sort of clunky way to access the recordings. The software version has not changed on our end, so the fix must have been something else that Dish did on their end.

 

[pattykay]

Delayed Live TV still does not work properly for the channels that were affected by this issue. After pausing or rewinding, and then pressing Play, it immediately jumps back to Live TV.

Possibly related to the "No Episodes Available" issue, Search functionality is also not working at all.

 

[pattykay]

Resetting the Wally (Diagnostics > Tools > Reset Wally) fixed the Search and "No Episodes Available" issues. Delayed Live TV is still screwed up on the affected channels. We will have to wait until there are more recordings from WDLI to see if we still have these issues or any other issues with those.

 

[TheKrell]

Delayed Live TV is still screwed up on the affected channels.

I am having a hell of a time using my J3 (and I think the H3 too) during chase play. A few skip forward/back does what it's supposed to. But then, during playback and without my doing anything to the remote, it skips ahead at least 30 seconds, and sometimes goes way way forward to live TV. This has been driving me crazy for months and never happened when I first go the H3. I think this is a software issue. But nobody has admitted that this has happened to them, so I don't know. It sounds like the Wally has a similar issue.

 

[pattykay]

I am having a hell of a time using my J3 (and I think the H3 too) during chase play. A few skip forward/back does what it's supposed to. But then, during playback and without my doing anything to the remote, it skips ahead at least 30 seconds, and sometimes goes way way forward to live TV. This has been driving me crazy for months and never happened when I first go the H3. I think this is a software issue. But nobody has admitted that this has happened to them, so I don't know. It sounds like the Wally has a similar issue.

Your post reminded me of a post in another thread recently. It is about a different issue, but the same principle may apply:

Brief picture/audio dropouts questions

We have a few channels that experience frequent dropouts where the video and audio both dropout completely. Watching Friends on Nick at Nite is by far the worst, happening every 5 minutes or so. It's also happened a time or two on MeTV and 1 or 2 other channels, but much less frequently. When...

www.satelliteguys.us

If i'm reading correctly,
Intermitent freeze frame type stuttering?
Getting worse over time?
Is it happening on all the recievers (hoppers/joeys)?
System checks show 'all green/good'?

These are the signs of a hard drive BEGINNING to fail.
Not enough errors yet to show faulty,
But occassionally stutters.

All video feeds of the Hopper system go through the hard drive before out to tvs or joeys.
That's how you get live tv rewind.
So when sat signal is good,
First suspect for these symptoms is hard drive.

I've had this exact scenario twice (years apart),
And replacing Hopper (hard drive) resolved problem.

Sent from my SM-G986U using the SatelliteGuys app!

I am wondering if this may be the cause of both of our issues. The weird thing is that my sister's issue only affects a couple of channels (standard-def locals from Eastern Arc). Then again, the OP in that other thread only saw an issue on a few channels.

At least with the Wally, it would just be a matter of replacing the external hard drive, if that is the cause of this issue. With your issue, it would mean replacing the entire Hopper. Unfortunately for my sister, I already tried replacing the Wally, like I said earlier, with no change in the issue, or at least not right away. I have no idea what caused the issue to change today.

 

[pattykay]

My sister just informed me that recordings from WDLI are back to not being able to be played again. I think maybe the only reason it worked the other day was because she only had one recording from that series at the time. Unfortunately, they usually schedule multiple episodes in a row, so there are almost always multiple recordings in the folders for each series she records.

 

[pattykay]

I posted this in another thread, but since it is yet another problem with my sister's Wally on U814, I thought I would also post it here:

Has anyone else had trouble tuning to the Dish Headlines channel (or any other mosaic) today? My sister is hooked up to Eastern Arc, using a Wally with software version U814. Every time I would try to tune to Dish Headlines or the other multi-channel views on her Wally, I would get a "Data Not Available. Unable to load." message, followed by signal loss pop-ups. I tried doing a Test Installation, and she has good signal on both satellites (61.5 and 72). I tried resetting her Wally through Diagnostics > Tools, and that did not fix the issue, either. Other channels, and Netflix, all work fine. It is just the mosaic apps that have trouble loading. This happens no matter whether I select them from the guide, from the apps menu, or by directly punching in the channel number.