HD DirecTiVo fails to record

I just posted this at the TiVo Community and official DirecTV forums. I just thought I'd post here, too, in case anyone has any great ideas.

I've been having a problem for a while where my HD-DirecTiVo will fail to record the first minute or so of a program.

Today I was checking what was being recorded, and Smallville and True Music were both supposed to have been being recorded, but they weren't.

In addition, when I selected the most recent recording (which happened to be the HDNet presentation of Quigley Down Under) it wouldn't show the details, but jumped back to the main menu. Once I played a little piece of the movie, I was able to then select it and see the details.

A few seconds later it started recording the two shows it had already missed the first 25 minutes of.

Then I noticed that it had failed to record some programs since the time it recorded Quigley. I went to the Recording History and picked one, Jeopardy, which said "Not Recorded", and selected it to get it to tell me why it failed to record, at which point it rebooted.

It also seems exceptionally slow, often taking 20 seconds to go back to the main menu from playing a recorded show. I don't know if that's to be expected, not related to my other problems, or important information.

There's obviously something wrong, and I'd appreciate some help in figuring out what.

I remember you posting this subject before, although I think you had fewer details about the problem than you do now.

My feeling is that there is something wrong with the hardware of your unit. Either a bad disk drive, or a corrupted piece of system code coming off of the hard disk. I would request a replacement from their tech support department.

My HD DirecTivo does NOT do anything like what you describe.

Is it still under warranty?

I've had similar problems with mine...

Few minute or few minutes of a show not getting recorded, so I only get a partial (you said you missed 25 mins of a show - that's way more than what I'm seeing). Also, the other day, 2 shows were missed completely, and when I looked in recording history and selected the show, it rebooted. After rebooting, recording history showed that the shows were not recorded due to power being disconnected, which it wasn't...

I've searched TiVo Community for these issues, and people have thought that they were due to problems with the signal from the satellite, which I think is unlikely.

- Jon

My money says it's a software bug that DirecTV has no particular interest in fixing (or paying TiVo to fix for them). I'm sure they'd be happy to set you up with their in-house brand DVR, though. Luckily, I don't appear to have suffered this bug, myself.

It sounds to me as if either you have an intermittent hardware fault (disk?) or, perhaps, your EPG info is getting corrupted somehow (Electronic Program Guide).

This is a known but not well published problem with all tivos. It seems that all tivos use the time codes of the current brodcast channel being recieved to start the recording. The problem being that different channels are not necessarly in sync, time wise, with each other.

I believe I read this in one of the Tivo community forums.

edit: I've been reading the forums, lots of comments similar "late starts up to 3min". No real info. Supposed solutions include clear and reset, replace the drives, update to the latest (assumes your tivo is not been updated to the latest sftwr). Basically there is some problem that tivo hasn't/won't own up to, even if they do eventually fix it.

I haven't seen any late starts. More like early starts. For instance Stargate,Stargate Atlantis,BattlestarG. All these recordings started and ended a little early.

I had some more weirdness tonight when trying to watch 24. During the first hour, there was a car crash when Jack was trying to get the bad guy. During that, my HD TiVo put me back to the screen where I can click on "resume playing" or "delete program" etc. When I tried to resume, it didn't start. Instead, I went to live TV, rewound to the beginning of the buffer (a bit after where the TiVo choked), and continued to watch. Later, when a commercial came on, I tried to use the 30 second skip button, and my TiVo rebooted...

After all this time and experience doing the PVR thing, you'd think these kinds of issues would be worked out.

Also, the processor used in the HD TiVo seems not up to snuff. Why the heck does it take 10 mins to boot? ...or set-up to record a new show for that matter?

Maybe DirecTV moving away from TiVo isn't such a bad thing, in the end...

So now I'm bit-torrenting 24 so that I can see what I missed. 17h 49m ETA... [Sigh]

- Jon

DirecTV is in control of all features and bug fixes on the DirecTiVo's. My understanding is that DirecTV has to pay TiVo for any development. Since DirecTV doesn't want to be paying an outside company for PVR software. They are claiming that it isn't anything they know about and will slowly be pushing everyone to the DirecTV PVR.

IMHO
The funny thing about this is that with all the Patents TiVo/ReplayTV has I'm sure the DirecTV PVR will end up costing them more then if they didn't change the original contract with TiVo.