[Just J]

Counting me, I am aware of 4 reports from 3 or 4 different markets that match my experience - a recording set to record the Rose Bowl with 1.5 hours of padding (i.e., 5 hours total recording time) ended early at 3h40m (5:25 CST), or at 1:37 on the game clock.

To try and nail down the scope of the problem, I asking people to report here if:

1. You were watching the show live and can state with some confidence that there was or was not some kind of transmission glitch when the game clock got to 1:37 (at 5:25pm CST). If you did see a glitch, please describe its nature and duration as best you can.
2. You recorded the show with 1.5 hours of padding and the entire 5 hours recorded. If so, please report if you didn't watch until after the recording finished (6:45 CST) or, if you did start watchiing the recording before the recording stopped, what time you started watching.
3. You recorded the show with some other amount of padding, and had no problem with the recording ending early, or with playing back the entire game.

Thanks in advance...

 

[hdtvfan0001]

Recorded (and played back) trouble free (didn't pad the time, just recorded the postgame too), along with the Capital One Bowl and Fiesta Bowl.

 

[kenmoo]

A bit off your specific topic but I watched a perfect 3 quarters of the Rose Bowl using the buffer to catch up to live action and then pause. I had to leave and left it paused for 3 hours. The 4th quarter watched 3 hours later was 80% jerky slowed motion with no sound. The data was there because I could pause the recording and it would come back to normal for 2-3 seconds and then corrupt again. I recorded the next two programs instead of manual padding and both of them had no sound either. MPEG4 HD in the Sacramento DMA.

 

[tfederov]

Padded it for an hour, it stopped at 2:09 left in the game.

 

[Earl Bonovich]

It isn't specific to the Rose Bowl.

It is the padding... it has been reported MULTIPLE times, that the padding feature is not functioning correctly.

As for the RoseBowl... watched it live and did some trickplaying in it with no issues.

 

[hasan]

Same here, no problems with live trick play. I do a lot of recording without problems, but I don't use padding.

 

[Just J]

It isn't specific to the Rose Bowl.

It is the padding... it has been reported MULTIPLE times, that the padding feature is not functioning correctly.

As for the RoseBowl... watched it live and did some trickplaying in it with no issues.

Thanks, Earl (and everyone else providing data). Nice to know there wasn't a broadcast glitch that would make this a new situation different from the known padding problem, about which I was hoping to gather more data to see if a pattern emerged. Does it happen 10 minutes into the padding? Or is it 11% into the padding? The Rose Bowl seemed to offer a widely viewed and very likely padded test case that would permit gathering lots of data.

The fact that everyone (reporting a problem) with a 1.5 hour pad had the game stop at 1.37 on the game clock, while the report above that a 1 hour pad stopped at 2.09 in the game clock, is suggestive (but far from conclusive) that the failure point is relative to the size of the pad, rather than at some absolute time into the pad. Hopefully, that kind of info will help the developers find and fix it.

 

[jfm]

Recorded with one hour of pad, recording stopped early, but didn't notice game clock, it was near the end of the game.

 

[DeanS]

I was at the game, but recorded it with, I believe, just a 1/2 hour pad. Got home later, skipped to tic and watched the second half only. The recording ended with about 2 minutes left. It recorded and played back just fine, and I attribute the cut off at the end to an inadeuate pad on the DVR on my part. Didn't matter, anyway, as the outcome was well known before the final two minutes of play.....GO SC!!!!

 

[Just J]

I was at the game, but recorded it with, I believe, just a 1/2 hour pad. Got home later, skipped to tic and watched the second half only. The recording ended with about 2 minutes left. It recorded and played back just fine, and I attribute the cut off at the end to an inadeuate pad on the DVR on my part.

No, it definitely cut off early. I was 10 minutes into the pad period when mine cut off at play clock 1.37. Sounds like yours cut off a little before that, so you had at least 20 more minutes of padding left.

Didn't matter, anyway, as the outcome was well known before the final two minutes of play.....GO SC!!!!

That was the only thing that made it bearable. Actually, since I was rooting for Michigan, it's probably best that I was put out of my misery early.

 

[wtrax]

No, it definitely cut off early. I was 10 minutes into the pad period when mine cut off at play clock 1.37. Sounds like yours cut off a little before that, so you had at least 20 more minutes of padding left.

That was the only thing that made it bearable. Actually, since I was rooting for Michigan, it's probably best that I was put out of my misery early.

I had mine padded for at least 30 minutes I can't remember now but it also cut off at 1:37 left. I believe there was a message that was something like "Partially recorded because the program was no longer available."

 

[richlife]

Recorded with 30 min padding and no problems with playback.

All my sports events are padded 30 min (at least those I remember). No problems with any.

 

[DStern]

What happened for me was that I recorded it with padding, was watching it but had not yet caught up to "real time" and then had the program lock up for me when I reached that spot. Very similar to what other people are reporting.

What I think happened was that the game in THE GUIDE ended at like 7:45 and ABC had a 15 minute post game show in the schedule. The glitch happened exactly when the boundary was crossed. In my show history, it showed that the game ended because it was "no longer in the guide."

Here is what IMHO I think happens - Football and other sports are long - then you pad them and make them longer.

The geniuses that wrote the HR20 software have recordings in progress check constantly to see if the show in changed or updated in the guide data.

This works fine, except for long shows. Why? Again, IMHO, after a few hours the HR20 dumps the old guide data. So - what you have is a case where the HR20 thinks that what it is recording is no longer showing BECAUSE IT FLUSHED THE DATA. Padding causes it to show up because it increases the likelihood that the show will be flushed from the guide data.

I might be wrong, but it does seem to fit what I have seen and other cases I have read about here.

As far as it working for some people it might be a function of how many channels are in their guide (it might not dump it as quick,) they were watching it "live" and were caught up, or MPEG-4 vs MPEG-2, or local network guide data, etc.

It is pretty pathetic that we have to think this much for a product we pay for...

 

[Stoodo]