Dish Pass sports timer pads

[Sharpinv]

My 722 keeps dropping the sports pad for Dish Pass sporting events. It's very frustrating to lose the last 30 minutes of a game, and it seems to be a pretty regular thing.

During football season I just gave up, deleted the Dish Passes and did a search every 9 days since a football team only plays once a week.

But now that we are into basketball season, I'm getting killed on dropped pads, all from Dishpass, none from a regular timer event.

With basketball, teams can play 1-3 times per week or more, so Dishpass is really nice for finding the channels and the team name in the info (the titles are almost always just "college basketball" or something - but it keeps dropping the 3rd hour of a basketball game when the original guide timeslot is 2 hours and I've added an hour.

My Dishpass shows the 3 hour time for the upcoming games, the one hour extension in the timer itself - but everytime it stops after the original guide time is completed - it drops the pad and if you look in the schedule it shows that the event has been completed and shows a 2 hour recording period even though it showed it would record 3 hours just before the timer fires. The other thing I notice is that unlike a regular DVR timer, you have to add the pad - my 722 does not automatically put a 60 minute sports pad on the Dish pass sporting events.

I'm wondering if this is just me considering that I couldn't find anyone else complaining about Dish pass pads getting dropped. I haven't tried it on a non-sporting event, but I would think if this was happening to sports fans there would be a lot of threads on it - but I couldn't find squat on Dish pass timer pad issues.

Is it just me and my wonderful 722?

Help!

[Ron Barry]

I will have to give this a try Sharpinv. When I recorded the Angel games earlier on this year I did not notice the behavior. I will try some Laker Dishpass timers and report what I see.

[Sharpinv]

I looked through the 722 manual, and in chapter 9, pg 67 found this:

If the program is a DishPASS timer, you cannot change the start early or end late times on an individual program; it must be changed on the DishPASS timer, from the Timers List.

But whether I go into the Dishpass event options or the Dishpass timer options, it allows me to extend the end (and beginning), and it seems to take (or at least shows the extension). With the manual telling us that you have to change it on the timer rather than the event, I suppose that the pad disappearing could be from my trying to change it on the timer - but it is still a bug as it shouldn't allow the user to *think* the timer has been padded.

FYI - also in the manual:

DVR Timers set for sporting events automatically end late by 60 minutes to allow for overtime. Change this setting in Options when you set up the timer.

I guess from this we can infer that the sports pad only happens for DVR timers, not Dishpass timers? Weird if true, and confusing for the user.

[Ron Barry]

I took a look at this today. I think this inconsistency lies in the fact that when you first create a dish pass it does not know anything about what type of programs it will be creating and that is when the padding gets set. In the other cases you are selecting from the guide so it knows and can act on it. Though inconsistent, DishPasses are a bit unique and it does not surprised that there is a difference in this behavior.

Looks like you will be cool if you just set the padding on the Dish Pass to be 60 minutes.

As for resetting the padding. Yes I would agree this is a bug if you set padding on a timer event and then it get erased by the Timer. My guess is this could be happening after nightly reboot.

[RasputinAXP]

DVR Timers set for sporting events automatically end late by 60 minutes to allow for overtime. Change this setting in Options when you set up the timer.

I guess from this we can infer that the sports pad only happens for DVR timers, not Dishpass timers? Weird if true, and confusing for the user.

That sounds correct to me; I stopped using Dishpass because of the quirkiness of it. There's some good granularity in its settings (only way to state a resolution preference, for example) but overall I'd rather have static recordings.

[Sharpinv]

Good point that the Dish pass doesn't know whether it is recording a sporting event or not given that doesn't use the 9 day guide - so that is a logical reason why it doesn't auto-pad sports events, I can buy that.

But I still maintain that if the manual says that you cannot pad a dish pass event, only a dish pass timer - then the software shouldn't let the user make that change on the event - which it does, but then doesn't work.

Since I'm not 100% sure whether I changed the pad on the event or the timer, I'm making sure all my dish passes (which are all sports) are padded on the timer and I'll see if it still drops pads or not.

At the very least, they should gray out this option on the Dish pass events since it doesn't appear to work and is even documented in the manual.

[Sharpinv]

What I have eventually determined via trial and error is that sports pads on Dishpass timers get dropped anytime there is a conflict with just the padded portion - i.e. the default is that a Dishpass pad always has bottom priority in a conflict and gets dropped. So even if the Dishpass has top priority, you lose the pad if there is any conflict at all. Don't know if this is a bug or on purpose, but seems odd that the Dishpass event and the Dishpass pad would have different priorities, but they do.

Also - it sure would be nice to have the option to set priorities to anchor at the bottom instead of them being bumped up everytime you add a timer. Even the autotune feature can't be set at a default bottom priority, so I'm constantly moving it back down to the bottom after adding one time events.