DVR Chatter

Well, that didn't work.  Called Comcast and they say they're having a "Service Related Issue" in my area.  Cable and (obviously) Internet are up, so I dialed through to one of the doofuses and asked him if the problem would cause my DVR to stop working.  He said "exactly." We all know how likely it is that I would get a correct answer the first time, so I'll be calling back shortly.

If it works now, this would be a good time to catch up on any recordings you haven't watched, and make a note of any that you may be able to recover soon, in case the resurrection is temporary.

If it occurrs again, and there's no word of a "service issue" in your area, and it sticks on hunt mode, it's possible your RF by-pass is going bad. I've had to change plenty of those in the past and it usually fixes them up. Unfortunately, you would have to exchange your box to have that done. Just be sure that should you see it go into hunt mode that you allow it a full rotation (FR 1-10) as sometimes it will not pick it up on the first try; it will pick it up the next time it hits FR 1.

Reloaded the guide to 6PM, and stopped.

Can anyone think of any reason why this would be the case other than the box dying out?  Everything else is loaded (OnDemand included), so I'm starting to think it is that RF deal (not a problem communications / network wise in dl'ing the guide) and I'm best off just getting a new one today.

If I'm going to go it's going to be in 1hr, so any quick brainstorming as to other reasons why the guide would stop loading would be appreciated.

Maybe you'll get a xx16, which will allow you to lose even more next time.   

I'm not in a good position to generalize, since I'm not in the iGuide area, but my 6412 worked fine for 18 months, until it died in a similar fashion to yours in May 2006 and I replaced it with a 3412.  I had problems from the beginning with transport functions and firewire output, finally giving up on firewire (use of the firewire caused the transport to go nuts, and only a power cycle would repair it, until the next use).  I swapped it for a 3416 in December 2006, just for the added storage.  I'm not sure how much of the transport function troubles are because of the Microsoft guide s/w, but for both the 34xx models I had to call and get Comcast to revert my firmware from 12.35 to 12.31 to get rid of a bug that was causing the boxes to reboot every hour or so.  We're still on 12.31 here, so the iGuide systems may be better.

Last edited by Wareagle (05-02-2007 1:18:14 PM)

andyross wrote:

There are several layers of Guide data. Channel names are sent very often. Near-term programming (about 4-8 hours out) is sent several times an hour. The full 2-week data is only sent 2 or 3 times a day. That is why it can take a day or two to completely fill in. By me, it typically takes place starting at 8pm, another in the middle of the night, and another in the early afternoon.

So that might explain why at 7PM last night I only had two shows scheduled to record,
AI at 8pm and House at 9PM.  At 9pm, two shows were recording, one was Robin Hood on BBC, which I have as a series setup but it was NOT on the schedule to record. I SWEAR it wasn't.
But there it was at 9pm..recording.