[Scott Greczkowski]

Welcome to the Official 721 Oddities thread!

As you can tell by looking around some people are begining to find some strange things going on with their 721's, while they should not be considered "bugs" as of yet you should post anything wierd you see with your 721's operation here.

(For the record while my 721 has done some strange things, the things it has done have been one time only things and I have never missed a recording, so in that regard the 721 has been flawless for me.)

By placing all your oddity's here in this thread it will make it much easier for Dish Network to find any possible bugs, it will also help other 721 owners who may have had the same problem know they are not alone, and if enough folks have the same oddity then we know we can report it as a bug. Again by having everything wierd listed in this thread it will help Dish Network find and fix things faster!

Thanks for your help!

 

[Bill D]

Here is one... Last night I finished watching something and wanted to delete it. The show was stopped, and was still in the little box in the PVR menu. When I went into the clean up area, I starting scrolling down to find the program I wanted to delete, and it bounced me back out of the menu and for about 20 seconds couldn't do anything, tried again same problem. I got out of the show that was still stopped and on to a live channel, and it then gave me no problems...

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Here is an odd one that has happened to me for the last 2 nights.

I have 2 shows I have set to record, one is Saturday night at 11pm, the other is Sunday Night at 10:30, they are both setup to record once a week.

On Wednesday night it recorded my Saturday Night 11PM show and had the correct title for the show, on Thursday Night it recorded my Sunday Night show again the title in the PVR screen was the correct show name.

Of course the shows it recorded were not the shows it was supposed to record. Lets hope on Saturday and Sunday it recorded the shows when they are really on.

Has this happened to anyone?

 

[rjenkins]

I think I saw this mentioned in the review thread, but I thought I'd include it anyway... One very annoying "oddity" I've found is that when you're watching something as it records, the second it stops recording, it often kicks you to live mode. Then you have to go back in, restart watching and manually fast forward to where you were. Very, very annoying. Especially since this is often how I watch TV now. I purposefully wait to start watching a program until it's been recorded for at least 20 minutes so that I can skip ahead. With this, I often get kicked to live mode during the last 5 minutes of show (often the best part of the show), and then I have to start the show again and manually fast forward to where I was.

 

[TerryC]

I was watching a recorded program today. During that playback a recording timer fired. I don't know if that had anything to do with it but soon after that recording began the sound on the recording I was watching went out and the video started running herky-jerky. It was skipping many frames at a time. I didn't want to reboot because of the recording that was active so I stopped playback, cleared out of the PVR events screen and got back to live TV. Then I pressed the PVR button and restarted the same recording and it worked fine from then on.

Then there's two from the post I contributed to the review thread. I got the "kicked back to live" bug that 501 users from a few months back would be familiar with. And also, when I delete a recording and get back to the PVR events menu, the picture in menu is not a smaller version of live TV. The menu seems to be overlaying the full screen, blocking out all of the video except the upper right corner where the picture in menu should be. Instead, what is there is just that part of the picture that would be in that area in a full screen. I hope I explained this one clearly. Anyone else get this bug?

Terry

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Yes I have had the Kick Back to Live bug happen a few times. I DO consider this a bug.

 

[rjenkins]

Yes, Terry, I've also seen the bug where after you delete a PVR item, the TV picture that's supposed to be small in the corner is instead full screen. I have my transparency option set to "high", so when this happens I can see that the TV picture is indeed full screen with the PVR display overlaying everything. Which is interesting, because I kind of like it like that... With the transparency set this way, you can still see what's going on with the TV picture. You kind of get a feel for what the "transparent guide" feature might (hopefully) look like once they implement it.

 

[Craig Fogus]

Something I noticed, not sure if this is covered somewhere or not. If you hit record while watching a show, and set it to manual stop, you cannot change channels even if you use PIP without it stopping the recording. Is there a way to do this, or is this just the way it is? I'm pretty sure it was working when I chose either stop at the end or extended the time.

*update*

I rebooted the unit, and it now seems to work. I'll keep an eye on it...

Never mind....it still fails if you close the PIP. Sorry....

 

[Kagato]

The PIP stuff still needs a little more logic put into it.

Manaully start recording a show.

Hit PIP and swap to another channel. Start recording that channel. Bring up the guide and attempt to go back to the first channel you are recording. You'll get a message saying you'll get the stop recording message. It's like one hand doesn't knwo what the other is doing.

 

[TerryC]

Thanks, rj, for the the heads up. I did have my transparency turned off. This might be an acceptable workaround for those who want to see what's going on with live TV while in that menu, as we wait for DISH to fix this bug.

And to all who are on the fence about getting a 721... Just for the record, while my posts so far have dwelt on the negatives of this machine (such that they are) I would recommend this receiver in a heartbeat.

Terry

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Kagato, the PIP problems were one of my gripes in my origional review, believe me, Echostar is working on this issue.

 

[motjes2]

While watching a live program, I hit the record button and set the recording to manual stop. I hit the PVR button in the remote control and start watching one of my recordings. A few seconds into it, the live program that I was trying to record suddenly stopped. I replicated this problem about three times until I finally decided to record with the extended option and this worked fine. Please try to replicate the problem above with the manual stop to see whether this is a bug or is just my 721. Thanks.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

motjes, this is the "kick to live bug" the 501 does the same thing.

 

[Tony S]

Originally posted by Scott Greczkowski
motjes, this is the "kick to live bug" the 501 does the same thing.

Actually, the 501 did have the kicked to live bug, but it has been fixed in the last few software releases. I think the fact that E* fixed this problem in the 501 is a good sign that they will fix it for the 721 as well.

 

[MediaMills]

Timer Question on the 721:
When I set a PVR timer, the name of the show shows up as the "Description" however when I set a manual timer (Auto-Tune, etc.) the description reads "DISH TIMER"
I can move left and right in this field, I can delete characters in the field and I can type numbers, but I cannot figure out how to get letters there. Is this the job for the 721 keyboard man?!?

Oh Keyboard man...where are you?!?

 

[TerryC]

This one would go under the oddities category. I've noticed that if I go to the EPG while watching a recorded program, the selected channel in the guide is always the same as the channel from which the recording was taken. Even if I wasn't on that channel before I started watching the recording.

No big deal. I'm just wondering why DISH would think that this feature is desirable enough to implement. What might the benefits be?

Terry

 

[gsusser]

Just got my 721 yesterday, yippee!

The first problem might have been a one time thing. I set up my timer for a bunch of weekly and daily events. Today, they started recording 3 hours early as if I was in the wrong time zone. However, the time shown when I hit the guide was correct. The Dish people only scratched their heads when I called. However, after deleting the events and re-entering them, they seem to be working now.

The 2nd one is more troublesome, especially a supervisor in the advanced area's response. I've locked one channel. The lock works as it should when I go to view the channel -- I'm prompted to enter a password. However, no password is required to view anything recorded on this channel. The response from DISH was that nothing can be done and that's not a bug. Bulloney. The 501 requires a passowrd to watch such a recorded event, and logicially, that's how it should work. I got nowhere with them, and this was a supervisor.

Aside from the above, I'm extremely pleased.

 

[Chaos]

I'll call this one an actual bug. I recorded a program tonight and went to watch it. The 721 locked up and had to be rebooted. When it came back up, I couldn't watch anything that was recorded. It took a smart card pull to get it back to normal. Thankfully no program loss.

 

[Craig Fogus]

Here's one that's really annoying. I hit record then choose "Extend time after end of event" Well, it never extends no matter how much extra time I put in there! It only records to the end of the current show. I have rebooted it to see if that was the problem, but it didn't help.

 

[Kagato]

I've been seeing a couple odd problems with my new 721.

1) Guide Time and Program time mismatch. If I bring up info or view while watching live TV I see the correct time. If I look in the guide it's off set by several hours. Dish Tech sent a re-auth down to correct. Which seemed to do the trick, but none of the timers have worked yet.

2) When selecting a program to record in the guide I cannot save certain programs as a record once timmer. i.e. Choose Daily Show from the guide. Hit record. From the timer screen I choose record once, and PVR. I hit the Create button. Nothing happens. No error message, nothing. Still in the options screen. However, if I choose any of the other recording options it allows me to create the timer.