Broken LNB, HR20 won't play recorded shows.

[rlightner]

Hey Guys,

Last night we had a massive wind/snow storm that cracked one of the LNBs on my slimdish. As soon as it cracked, both of my HR20's recieved the 711 error so I rebooted them and now it is stuck on Acquiring Guide Data... When I hit the LIST button on the remote I can see my recorded shows, but when I chose to play a show the HR20 hangs. Meaning I can not EXIT out of the options of the selected show nor can I bring up the menu.

Has this ever happened to you? If so, how did you play your recorded shows? I have DirecTV coming out tomorrow to fix the dish, but the family is getting restless tonight and would like to at least watch the recorded material.

If no one has a temporary fix for this, I'll assume that it is a bug with the HR20.

Thank you,

Robert

[HardCoder]

As far as I know, no DirecTV DVR can play recorded material without being connected to the service. I'm not sure what the point of this is but I'm sure it has to do with making money somehow. Why your particular unit is working the way it is, I dunno.

[Blurayfan]

You could playback the shows if you could somehow give the HR20 signal during the boot sequence. After your up and running you can disconnect the sat feed, the unit will still play the recordings.

[linuxworks]

As far as I know, no DirecTV DVR can play recorded material without being connected to the service. I'm not sure what the point of this is but I'm sure it has to do with making money somehow. Why your particular unit is working the way it is, I dunno.


this is SUCH an important detail!

I didnt' know this, going in.

its so important that I think customers should be made aware of this.

it seems reasonable to expect that past recordings should not have their status changed, no matter what the _current_ status of the account is.

this is a legal case just waiting to happen. its just a matter of time until enough people are sufficiently annoyed at this kind of DRM behavior.

the right thing to do is for D* to have customers be informed of this and consent to this. or at least legally be responsible for getting the customer to sign some area indicating he knows he can lose recordings that he once had if his bill or account is not current. this ALSO includes the technical case of not getting signal or some other snafu. it seems the default behavior of the box is to NOT allow you to view recordings UNLESS (?) a positive authentication is received. (is that true?)

at any rate, this is counter to what normal people would expect. therefore, I would expect D* to have people acknowledge this (unusual) behavior.

the common case is that you buy a cd or dvd or vinyl album and NONE of them 'stop working' no matter what the producer of that work does. and even with my last two tivo units, even THEY didn't stop working when my service stopped (old analog series1 and my current direct-tivo hdvr2). so its not like there has always been this 'lock-up your bits' behavior in dvr-land.

I feel this is a dangerous precident. and I feel a bit lied to since this very important fact was conveniently left out of the 'sales pitch' when I was sold my HD pkgs...

[houskamp]

well since they are 'stuck' on D*'s 'leased' box, if you canceled the service you would lose the box and the recordings anyway...

[WolfClan Dan]

this is SUCH an important detail!

I didnt' know this, going in.

its so important that I think customers should be made aware of this.

it seems reasonable to expect that past recordings should not have their status changed, no matter what the _current_ status of the account is.

this is a legal case just waiting to happen. its just a matter of time until enough people are sufficiently annoyed at this kind of DRM behavior.

the right thing to do is for D* to have customers be informed of this and consent to this. or at least legally be responsible for getting the customer to sign some area indicating he knows he can lose recordings that he once had if his bill or account is not current. this ALSO includes the technical case of not getting signal or some other snafu. it seems the default behavior of the box is to NOT allow you to view recordings UNLESS (?) a positive authentication is received. (is that true?)

at any rate, this is counter to what normal people would expect. therefore, I would expect D* to have people acknowledge this (unusual) behavior.

the common case is that you buy a cd or dvd or vinyl album and NONE of them 'stop working' no matter what the producer of that work does. and even with my last two tivo units, even THEY didn't stop working when my service stopped (old analog series1 and my current direct-tivo hdvr2). so its not like there has always been this 'lock-up your bits' behavior in dvr-land.

I feel this is a dangerous precident. and I feel a bit lied to since this very important fact was conveniently left out of the 'sales pitch' when I was sold my HD pkgs...

i agree. when the occasional storm rolls through, i feel i should be able to watch my recorded material. however, if no signal at all can be attained, i can not.

this makes absolutely NO sense to me. my account is, and always was, in good standing. the programs were recorded while i paid my bill. i should be able to watch them when i actually have no other option.

[La Push Commercial Codman]

Hey Guys,

Last night we had a massive wind/snow storm that cracked one of the LNBs on my slimdish. As soon as it cracked, both of my HR20's recieved the 711 error so I rebooted them and now it is stuck on Acquiring Guide Data... When I hit the LIST button on the remote I can see my recorded shows, but when I chose to play a show the HR20 hangs. Meaning I can not EXIT out of the options of the selected show nor can I bring up the menu.

Has this ever happened to you? If so, how did you play your recorded shows? I have DirecTV coming out tomorrow to fix the dish, but the family is getting restless tonight and would like to at least watch the recorded material.

If no one has a temporary fix for this, I'll assume that it is a bug with the HR20.

Thank you,

Robert

Time for some Waylon Jennings country music.

[houskamp]

i agree. when the occasional storm rolls through, i feel i should be able to watch my recorded material. however, if no signal at all can be attained, i can not.

this makes absolutely NO sense to me. my account is, and always was, in good standing. the programs were recorded while i paid my bill. i should be able to watch them when i actually have no other option.

You can as long as the box doesn't have to reboot..

[linuxworks]

well since they are 'stuck' on D*'s 'leased' box, if you canceled the service you would lose the box and the recordings anyway...

(shudder)

this reminds me SO much of the circuit city divx controversy, that eventually killed that whole concept. that you'd be SOL if the 'phone home' place decided you didn't have a right to view the pieces of plastic you had in front of you (or, rather, the data on it).

this is another reason why I won't buy DRM music. I do NOT like renting music. once content crosses a pc, saving a local copy is NOT harming the copyright holder (even though they'll argue till blue in the face that it does).

again, dvd's currently don't get locked from some remote source. cd's don't and VHS tapes don't, cassettes don't, etc etc.

I can see why the entertainment and content delivery industry thinks that its time we change the old 'own it' model to a 'lease only' model. pure money grab.

the more I think about it, the more I think we need to go receiver-only and do the recording part ourselves. I really hope we can GET there, eventually - for HD. we're there today for SD - no problem. its HD that's all locked up tight! ;(

btw, when you sign up for some of the rental style music services, don't they have to tell you that your content can disappear (rights go away) if various things do or don't happen?

so why is DTV getting away with this?

again, its something contrary to what the normal public would assume abou the recordings that they have SAVED.

unless we're now at the point where we have re-defined the word 'saved'.

[houskamp]

btw, when you sign up for some of the rental style music services, don't they have to tell you that your content can disappear (rights go away) if various things do or don't happen?

Problably why the box is set up to charge when veiwed not when recorded, That way they can say you haven't "purchased" it yet..

[Coffey77]

As much as I like the HR20, I could build a darn good computer that's a LOT faster, larger HDD space and even a printer for $299 or whatever the going rate is for the HR20's now. If only they'd get to selling a PCI card that'd fit in the computer - I know there's rumors floating around...

[Coffey77]

btw, when you sign up for some of the rental style music services, don't they have to tell you that your content can disappear (rights go away) if various things do or don't happen?

Problably why the box is set up to charge when veiwed not when recorded, That way they can say you haven't "purchased" it yet..

My computer's been wiped out so many times by bad HDD's and a virus or two so now the DRM is telling me I have used too many computers (over 5) to listen to my bought music. I try and go and "unsubscribe" one of them but you have to go into it with that same computer to remove it... Funny thing is, it IS the same computer - registered 5 times, except one of my laptops still works... Stupid.

[linuxworks]

I've had hard drive crashes and stuff like that too - but RESPONSIBLE sysadmins (even just single users, at home) appreciate the ability to back up their stuff and not have to worry about their content disappearing if they have taken some basic precautions.

if you back up your system and even have redundant hardware (shelf spares) you are generally in pretty good share for surviving problems.

but what if you can't do any of that even if you wanted to? that's what greedy DRM has done to us. crippled our ability to even backup our own material.

this isn't new to me, though - on my very first tivo (s1) I thought I had a bad motherboard and wanted to swap it with a working one. silly me to think that an equivalent motherboard from an identical machine - but using my existing drives - would work. SILLY ME!

so yes, if you lose your motherboard you lose the drives that 'go with it' and all the data that is on there.

DRM has given us drives that are, by their own design, not really capable of BEING backed up. the privilege of being able to has been withdrawn. without any of our real say-so.

dvd's were broken and the industry thought that was rock solid. give it time and there will be ways to get the precious HD data in the clear and savable in normal .mpg files. might take time, but someone like 'dvd jon' might already be working on it .. you never know. ;)

[WolfClan Dan]

You can as long as the box doesn't have to reboot..

what do you mean? when i am watching live tv, and the signal is lost, i can not access my recorded programs.

IF i am already watching a recorded program, it allows me to continue watching with the stupid disclaimer indicating the sat is searching for a signal. in this situation i can also access other recorded programs.

this will not occur if i am watching live tv and lose the signal. the recorded programs will not play in that setting.

:confused:

[Blurayfan]

what do you mean? when i am watching live tv, and the signal is lost, i can not access my recorded programs.

IF i am already watching a recorded program, it allows me to continue watching with the stupid disclaimer indicating the sat is searching for a signal. in this situation i can also access other recorded programs.

this will not occur if i am watching live tv and lose the signal. the recorded programs will not play in that setting.

:confused:

A recent update to the HR20 removed the Searching for Sat message while playing back a recording. At the same time it gave the ability to playback recordings when loss of signal occured unless the box reboots during the outage.

[Blurayfan]

HR20: 0xFA (http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=70789)
Improvements
"Searching for Satellite" On-Screen-Display (OSD) is surpressed when it is occuring in the background.

[rlightner]

A recent update to the HR20 removed the Searching for Sat message while playing back a recording. At the same time it gave the ability to playback recordings when loss of signal occured unless the box reboots during the outage.

That's exactly what I should not have done, rebooting the HR20 during an outage is a bad idea. I am learning the hard way. When I had my HR10-250's, I was able to boot them without any satalites input and watch my recorded shows. Again, I hope this is just something the programmers forgot to include and will be fixed in the future.