mardi 4 octobre 2016

Poor Tivo programming

I've seen many people question why a Tivo can't record a program when it loses communication with its tuning adapter, even when the program is on a channel that doesn't require the tuning adapter. Usually the answer is that the tuning adapter supplies the channel list so if it's not available the Tivo doesn't know what frequency to tune. Well I can now unequivocally say that's clearly not the case.

At 8:40, my wife noticed that the Tivo record light was not on when both NCIS and The Flash should be recording. So I turned the TV on to find a "Lost Communication with Tuning Adapter" error. I clicked "OK" and then power-cycled the tuning adapter to reestablish communication with the Tivo. While it was rebooting (takes about four minutes) I checked the record history and sure enough both NCIS and The Flash were not recorded due to "No Signal" errors. My wife asked if we couldn't just record the programs from the tuner disk cache that the Tivo keeps. I didn't think this would work because surely the Tivo couldn't tune to the channels because it couldn't communicate with the tuning adapter. And even if it could tune to the channels, it would have wiped the cache when I hit "OK" to the tuning adapter error message and power-cycled the tuning adapter.

To my surprise, when I checked the tuner list, two of the tuners were on the channels for NCIS and The Flash. So I switched to the tuner on NCIS and sure enough there was 30 minutes of program I could access. Then I switched to the tuner on The Flash and again there was 30 minutes of program that I could access. At this point the tuning adapter was still rebooting, so I decided to wait until it finished and then I would hit record to capture as much of each channel's buffer as possible. Silly me. When the tuning adapter finished rebooting, the Tivo dumped the cache for all tuners.

So what does this tell me? It tells me that Tivo programmers COULD program the Tivo to record programs on channels not controlled by a tuning adapter after it has lost communication with the tuning adapter. My experience above proves that the Tivo was able to tune to the correct channel after losing communication with the tuning adapter. It also proves that the Tivo was able to remain tuned to the channel and cache playable video. So why doesn't it go ahead and save that video as a recorded program?


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