sports timer?

[Mr.72]

Here's the story: I have a Dish Pass timer set to record anything with 'Spurs' in the title or description. The idea is to record Spurs games. This is the only reliable way I have found to record them because sometimes the title is "NBA Basketball", sometimes it's "Spurs at xxxxx", sometimes it's "San Antonio at xxxxx" and then only lists 'Spurs' in the description...

So the problem is, it records the same program on different channels and sucks down all of the tuners.

For example, let's say a game is on NBATV and my RSN. So the DVR will try and record the SD and HD feeds of both channels. Usually as a result, I use both tuners to record the identical SD feeds on NBATV and the RSN, and I have to manually go in and skip them to get it to record the HD version. In all, it tries to record the same program on four different channels at once.

This also happens when something is on a local TV channel. It gets it on the 85xx channel, the regular Sat channel (like 024-00) and the OTA channel (024-01), using all three tuners to record the identical show.

Considering that games may appear on many different channels, sometimes in SD & HD, sometimes only in SD, sometimes OTA, etc., this problem comes up quite often.

Why does it record these duplicates? How can I get it to just record one, and only the HD? This causes a lot of timer conflicts.

[Ron Barry]

Something is not smelling right. If you have a timer for the same show, it should not record the same show on all three tuners. The only way I could see this is if there was a case were their is not useful guide information for the receiver to determine if the shows are the same. In normal cases it should only record one and the Dish Pass has a "Set Resolution" setting so you can set what one you want.

One thing to keep in mind. You will see timer events for all shows that meet a timer criteria then you will see shows be skipped for various reasons.

But my guess is in your case it is seeing the shows you want as separate shows. Most likely because there is not any show info for these games. If this is the case there is no way for the receiver to determine duplicates and my suggest would be to set a few Dish Pass timers on the specific HD channels that have the Spurs on. That will get ride of your SD conflicts. If you still get the conflicts then the only way around this is to do things more manually. Dish receivers need Show info to make accurate decisions and without it things like this can crop up.

[Mr.72]

The problem is that the Alternate channels have different numbers from time to time and you cannot predict what the channel number will be. These ALT channels only appear in the guide when there is something on them. If I had an accurate listing of what channels MIGHT have Spurs games it would be easy enough. But sometimes, it is different channels simultaneously airing the same game, such as NBATV and the RSN, for example. In this case, we have the exact same game on two channels, and the DVR will record them both. I would think multiple timers will increase the chances of getting multiple recordings.

The other issue is that sometimes when more than one channel has the game, it is actually blacked out on one channel, so the timer will record a blank (zero-length) recording.

Just looking for a good sports timer strategy that will make this work. TV shows my family likes to watch are starting up here in a couple of days (24, AI, Lost, etc.) so the complaint level at my house over skipping new episodes of TV shows in favor of recording three channels with the exact same Spurs game is about to reach a fever pitch.