[hogwash]

My family keeps hitting the max timers/events on our 722, and I was in the process of deleting/modifying our timers and all of a sudden the scheduled events went from 226 to 22 and won't show any scheduled recordings after 2pm tomorrow!! The guide data is still available for the usual 8-9 days. Any suggestions or do I have to delete and reenter all 91 timers that we have?

This may be the final straw. This box is about as buggy and poorly designed as anything I have ever seen. It is about 18 hours away from being chucked out the second floor window.

 

[Ron Barry]

First off... pull the power and plug it back in. Hopefully this will get the box back to a reliable state.

As for entering in your 91 timers.. You really need to get your timer count down from 91 and see if you can return stability back to the box. Yes there is a limit of 97 but given that you appear to be running into stability issues, I would suggest getting it down to around 70 and see stability is returned.

You say that you are hitting max timer/events? What is your timer event count at 91 timers. What is the mix of timers do you have. Is it mainly ALL/New timers? One time timers? Dish Pass? Good to capture this type of use case and feed it back to Dish, but like I said above. I think the first step to getting your box running stable is to start lowering your Timer count and see if the box becomes stable.

Another suggestion.. If you keep bouncing into the 97 timer limit, you really need to think about having two DVRs to balance the load. It is never a good idea to run a device up against a resource limit. From my experience, most QA that is done is done on average usage not the maximum load so even though testing is usually down at the edges it is not where most of it happens and therefore it is more likely to run into performance related defect when running at resource limits.

Well those are two quick suggestions to try and narrow down what is happening... For a point of reference.. I run about 40 to 50 timers with about 300 to 400 timer events and my box as not rebooted or locked up in months.

 

[ChuckA]

If the power cord reset does not help get your schedule corrected, try doing a check switch test. If the guide data has become corrupt (even though it displys correctly) this will force a complete new guide data download and schedule rebuild.

 

[CABill]

I believe that the receiver won't add any more timer events after hitting a timer that would throw the total number of events over the max. It has been too long since I did any experimenting to recall specifics, but I remember something to the effect that it didn't "fill events to max" but did all events for each timer until some timer would be too many. If you have a timer that suddenly has 300 events in the next 9 days, I believe (about 30% confidence) you might only see 22 and no more. All my testing would have been on a 942 so I don't know that it would carry forward to a ViP.

 

[hogwash]

Last night I fully powered down, unplugged and rebooted the machine and nothing changed. Then magically overnight (and before the call and reboot scheduled for 9am) all my events were restored.

I have been trying really hard to adjust to the 722's abysmal interface and ignore it's many design flaws and bugs. But this is ridiculous.

And I am getting tired of being criticized for having/wanting more than 96 timers. How much processing power is really needed to deal with these timers? Why is there a limit at all? And I am not using any dish pass timers, they are mostly weekly/daily timers. My 10 year old TiVo never reached a limit on my season passes and it was working a lot harder with wish list passes and processing via thumbs up/down stuff that it thinks we would like. Can anyone explain why anyone would be able to claim that this box is "better than a TiVo?"

Why would you pay for hundreds of channels if you weren't going to watch them? Why did dish bother putting a 50 hour HD/350 hour SD capacity into the 722 if they don't expect people to record a lot of shows? Honestly I am just trying to use what I am paying for, and what does dish get out of discouraging the use of their service? Unless they just really want to drive up DirecTV's subscribers.

 

[Ron Barry]

Hogwash,

First off I was not trying to criticize you for the need for more timers. What I suggested was a way to determine if the fact that you are bumping into the limit is the cause of the issues you are describing and to get the box into a stable condition where you can enjoy watching TV. Nothing more nothing less. I further suggested that if you have that much activity on our box that a 2nd DVR might be a solution to consider. All boxes have their different limitations and design goals. From the complaints I have read here from TIVO users on the responsiveness of guide management it is possible that the reason the 722 has a limit of 96 timers is to keep the responsiveness at what Dish felt was an acceptable level. Of course this is just a guess.

I am not a TIVO user so I won't comment on the reasons the 722 is better than the TIVO and since this is a support forum if you want to discuss and compare TIVO to the 722, I would suggest doing it into the General Dish forum where that type of topic can be more freely discussed since the support forums have a "No Bash" rule in place. If you do a search for TIVO and 722 here and in the general forum my guess is you will find a number of threads where users have chimed in with their opinions.

As for getting you to a reliable state.. I am not sure I can offer much more advice since I believe dancing around the limit is not a good way to run these boxes. Another example. Say you are running at around 560 timer events and a week and later one of your timers goes from 560 to 590. Well guess what, at this point you are over the timer limit. From the description, what happens is the timer events over 576 are ignored. That is why I always recommend to keep your timer events at around 500 to leave room for the growth that occurs from week to week.

For 99% of the people here, this limit is not an issue. But for the 1% that it is and issue, it is good to know about this limit and to manage around it to avoid a missed show. Nice enhancement I would like to see is some warning indication when this condition has occurred.

As for why 50 hours. I personally have 40 timers and 300 timer events created and I am always running out of space, but then again my HD DVR is used for recording 90% HD content. I also consider 500 timer events in a 9 day period to be a lot of timer events. There are 216 hours in the same period.

Actually this subject has been discussed a few times in the past and the limit was actually increased at one point and it is definitely a performance trade off. Here is some threads you might be interested in. If you do a search in this forum for timer event and limit you can find a lot of discussions on it.

http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=81333&highlight=Timer+Event+Limit
http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=82772&highlight=Timer+Event+Limit

 

[ChuckA]

Just to add a couple of points here, I don't believe reaching the maximum number of timers causes any stability problems on the receiver. I was adding a new timer the other day and it told me I had the maximum number of timers. I of course did not believe it until I went and checked. Sure enough it was right. I had reached the max by adding timers over the years without going back and deleting timers for shows that are no longer on.

Many of the timers I had defined were for old shows that are no longer scheduled and the large number of timers presented no problems. I believe that is because they were not generating hundreds of events in the schedule. They were just there taking up space and never causing schedule events.

My point is I believe you need to worry about the number of events in the schedule and not the number of timers defined. Obviously if the timers are going to hit, reducing timers is a method to reduce the number of events so there is a relationship.

I'm not criticizing anyone, but I can't understand how a small group of people can consume over 500 scheduled events every 9 days. There are only 216 hours in 9 days (432 half hours). So you would have to keep two timers running almost all the time and watch/delete or offload recordings 12+ hours a day if they are all recording. The other possibility is that the timers that are defined are generating many more events than recordings are actually being done. That is, many duplicates and skipped events by priority. If there are lots of events that never get recorded because of conflicts, the box is just being asked to do more than it phsyically can do. If this is the case, I agree with Ron in suggesting another receiver needs to be added. Throw more tuners at the problem in the form of another receiver and everyone in the family may be happier. I have two receivers connected to my TV and its only me and the wife watching them. A simple switch of the active TV input gives us each our own timer schedules. I sure don't want to be messing with HER timers.

In any case I would suggest a close look at what events are in the schedule and see what is using up that many event slots. I'm sure they are not all recordings that happen. You might as well reduce the clutter if it is not getting recorded anyway.

 

[phrelin]

I guess I'm just too old to understand this.

I spend a great deal of time managing my timers because stuff I really want frequently gets displaced by stuff I'd like to have when I just let things to go. What don't I understand?

 

[Ron Barry]

Good points Chuck.

I was under the assumption that all the timers had timer events and therefore HogWash was possible running into a situation where his particular use case was resulting in possible CPU starvation or memory corruption (I think he mentioned reboots when trying to manage timers and that is what triggered my thoughts).

I don't think Hogwash indicated how many timer events he has when at 91 timers. That would be an interesting number to know. You can see the # of timer events by pressing DVR twice when the picture is up.

 

[ChuckA]

What don't I understand?

I'm not sure there is anything you don't understand. I spend time every day reviewing my schedule to make sure I'm not going to miss something that is important to me. So, I'm right there with you on that.

I guess some folks just try and assign the priorities such that the most important stuff has the hightst likelyhood of getting recorded and never check in advance. But, with three tuners I can often work around situations that could cause something to be missed. When you setup a timer you don't always pick the best channel for it. Moving timers around to different OTA/sat combinations can often make a difference.

 

[hogwash]

Ron, I am not just singling you out there. Your response, while not very helpful in solving my missing events problem, was not written or taken in an offensive tone. I was more referring to previous threads where my requests for help quickly devolved into a thread on how obscene my number of timers are. I don't like maxing out my timers either, which is why I was "in the process of deleting/modifying our timers" as I clearly stated in my first post. And that is what resulted in my problem.

And I don't think that comparing different boxes abilities is "bashing". I will readily admit that I may have come across with a harsher than usual tone, but l think a little anger is justified when your DVR all of a sudden drops all of your events.

Now getting back to the topic at hand. I can't say for sure how many total events I had at the time since I generally don't show the skipped events, but it was probably in the 500-540 range. Chuck, I don't think anyone is talking about recording 500+ events in a 9 day period. And unless you are setting every timer up as an individual event so as to avoid conflicts, you are going to run into a large number of skipped events especially if you are recording more off of cable networks that air the same show multiple times per day. And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole point of the DVR that it will resolve schedule conflicts and will sort through the events for the new ones to record. If the box can't physically handle doing that then why do they offer the "new" option at all?

 

[Ron Barry]

Ron, I am not just singling you out there. Your response, while not very helpful in solving my missing events problem, was not written or taken in an offensive tone. I was more referring to previous threads where my requests for help quickly devolved into a thread on how obscene my number of timers are. I don't like maxing out my timers either, which is why I was "in the process of deleting/modifying our timers" as I clearly stated in my first post. And that is what resulted in my problem.

I definitely would be interested to know how things are when you get in the 70 to 80 range. Also check your timer events. By the way, I am not suggesting you keep them there.. But from there I would add a few at a time and see if the box goes from stable to unstable. It will give you an idea if you are hitting a limit. By the way, for the record I don't ever consider a box rebooting because of a configuration acceptable. It should this and if this is the case it is a bug that needs to be addressed in my book.

And I don't think that comparing different boxes abilities is "bashing". I will readily admit that I may have come across with a harsher than usual tone, but l think a little anger is justified when your DVR all of a sudden drops all of your events.

Well it can and it can't be. I have seen too many of those type of threads turn into a bash fest and that is why I always suggest to do it in the general area where there is more freedom in throwing rocks. As for justified anger, nothing wrong with it as long as it does not turn into rock throwing at Dish E* department. I am sure you are going through your share of customer pain and it is definitely acceptable in the support forums to indicate such. Where the line gets drawn if that pain turns into direct insults towards the Engineer or Dish as a company. There are reasons for this and would be happy to discuss them if you fell the need through PM to avoid taken this conversation further off topic than I already have.

Now getting back to the topic at hand. I can't say for sure how many total events I had at the time since I generally don't show the skipped events, but it was probably in the 500-540 range. Chuck, I don't think anyone is talking about recording 500+ events in a 9 day period. And unless you are setting every timer up as an individual event so as to avoid conflicts, you are going to run into a large number of skipped events especially if you are recording more off of cable networks that air the same show multiple times per day. And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole point of the DVR that it will resolve schedule conflicts and will sort through the events for the new ones to record. If the box can't physically handle doing that then why do they offer the "new" option at all?

I think even if you hide events the count still indicates all events. I don't think Chuck was saying you would not run into them. You definitely going to run into skipped events for sure and you will also have multiples of the same event because of map downs (Something I wish they would improve). Are you mapping down channels? If so, what you might want to try is turn off your mapping and thus reduce your overall timer count.

As a reference point, I checked tonight. 137 timer events and 41 timers. I would sure love to see your Timers and DVR List because even with multiple events I would suspect that is one busy box.

One other thing to look for.. When are you doing your update. Do you have a lot of late night activity? Something to look into. To give your DVR a chance to update guide you want to try and avoid having timers going off around it because then it will skip the update and that can result in your guide not getting updated.

Hopefully you can get the box to a steady state for your environment, give it some time to get a good feel for it, and then hopefully start working up from there and ofcourse provide your experiences back.

 

[TulsaOK]

As a reference point, I checked tonight. 137 timer events and 41 timers. I would sure love to see your Timers and DVR List because even with multiple events I would suspect that is one busy box.

I have 85 timers and 330 events. I have a lot of duplicate timers set for satellite and OTA. If I need to skip one event, it will automatically restore the other timer so there's no manual intervention.
A few weeks ago I had an issue with reboots every time I accessed a timer, but I actually had less timers then. That mysteriously cleared itself up after about three or four days.

 

[Ron Barry]

Interesting TulsaOk. It is possible that we might be dealing with a DB corruption issue here or something else, but given the OPs post I felt it might make sense to rule out CPU starvation.

Please report back if it starts happening to you again.

 

[SaltiDawg]

...
And I don't think that comparing different boxes abilities is "bashing". ...

You've said:

• "This box is about as buggy and poorly designed as anything I have ever seen."
• "I have been trying really hard to adjust to the 722's abysmal interface and ignore it's many design flaws and bugs. But this is ridiculous."
• "Can anyone explain why anyone would be able to claim that this box is "better than a TiVo?"

Which of the above was not "bashing?"

 

[hogwash]

SaltiDawg, those are all statements of fact. How is stating that the player is buggy and a pain to deal with "bashing?" Isn't this the forum to discuss bugs in the system? Nothing will ever get fixed if we aren't allowed to discuss problems.

Now I suppose the real question is are these bugs due to the hardware or the software? I would hope that the hardware being underpowered isn't the problem, as I can't believe that my 10 year old TiVo had more processing power than my 1 year old 722. So why doesn't dish fix these glaring problems with their timer/event limits in the software? Does anyone have a line into their programming dept about when these stability issues will be addressed?

 

[phrelin]

SaltiDawg, those are all statements of fact. How is stating that the player is buggy and a pain to deal with "bashing?" Isn't this the forum to discuss bugs in the system? Nothing will ever get fixed if we aren't allowed to discuss problems.

Now I suppose the real question is are these bugs due to the hardware or the software? I would hope that the hardware being underpowered isn't the problem, as I can't believe that my 10 year old TiVo had more processing power than my 1 year old 722. So why doesn't dish fix these glaring problems with their timer/event limits in the software? Does anyone have a line into their programming dept about when these stability issues will be addressed?

Gee, I have a line in to get the audio dropout problem fixed and I know they're working on the software, but it does take weeks and weeks to figure these things out and debug the fix. In the meantime, many customers in many areas of the country can't record watchable shows on Fox and ABC.

"Event limit" isn't a real glaring problem. I've never hit it and I season shift alot of shows. I haven't seen it listed on the Poll: What is your top features? where the top three desired features are:

1. Web Access to Receiver (Web Scheduling)
2. Native Resolution Pass through
3. Enhanced Content sharing through network

Of course, I'm not typical and the only one of these that even hits my interest list is #3.

 

[SaltiDawg]

SaltiDawg, those are all statements of fact. ...

Oh, hogwash.

Your "statements of fact" are not "facts," but rather your opinion. You've come to a 622/722 forum and extolled the virtues of another system which many of us think little of. I never thought the following would end up in one sentence, but "Hogwash, you're trolling."

Bye

 

[47HO]

Salti,

I'm glad I'm not the only one thinking "troll".


Hogwash, you stated "And I am getting tired of being criticized for having/wanting more than 96 timers."

Getting tired? There were only three responses to your OP when you stated this.


I am not calling you a "troll". But as Salti indicated, your posts do give that impression.


I hope you do get your issues resolved.

 

[hogwash]

Can we please try and avoid personal attacks here. I have run into a very serious bug in this hardware, and nobody wants to address it. My statements, while previously acknowledged as been peppered with extreme frustration, are clearly facts. This is a buggy box, I can't see how that can be denied. And my comparison to my old TiVo was in regard to the fact that something is not being handled right in the hardware or software. Having more than 96 timers is physically possible on DVRs on the market for the last decade, this box should be considerably more powerful, and I don't see that as a valid excuse for instability.

Now if you aren't interested in helping deal with the problems at hand, I would kindly ask you to keep your opinions to yourself. And let's keep this thread on topic.