DSR704 not recording properly

[christockos]

I upgraded my Phillips DirecTivo DSR704 by adding a 160 gig Twin Breeze kit. Upgrade went easily and the tuner works great, problem is with its recording.

On some shows, you select it from the menu, hit "play", and then immediately it brings up the "Delete this recording now/Don't delete" screen. I hit "Don't delete" and it says "Error playing a recording. The recording was not able to record this progrqam because there was no video signal on the channel. You may have been trying to record on a channel that you don't receive." I know this isn't the case, since it gets the beginning of the show on a previous recording. For example, I saw the beginning of "30 Rock" on the end of "The Office", but now "30 Rock" brings up the error message.

There is another problem with some recordings ("The Office" just recorded for example). When playing it back, you get to 8 minutes and it stops. You can't scan forward, but if you hit the "go to end" button, it jumps to the end. You can scan backwards to about 23 minutes in the recording and watch it from there. If you don't stop scanning backwards in time, it jumps to the beginning of the recording again and you have to navigate back to 23 minutes to see the end.

Some recordings work fine. One symptom, although I have increased hard drive capacity, I still get the yellow circle with exclamation mark next to A LOT of recordings. It's like the machine thinks I don't have the new space, although it says I do, and thinks a recording will be deleted soon to make room for new recordings, although it hasn't needed to do so yet.

One more thing, we have Vonage, so everytime I go to look at the list, I get the "you haven't connected your phone line, etc." msg. Minor inconvenience, but this direcTivo's phone line doesn't work with Vonage and doesn't connect with the web.

Whew. Lot of info I know, but I wanted to be thorough. Please help me troubleshoot.

Thanks so much.

-chris

[WK-Jeff]

Some recordings work fine. One symptom, although I have increased hard drive capacity, I still get the yellow circle with exclamation mark next to A LOT of recordings. It's like the machine thinks I don't have the new space, although it says I do, and thinks a recording will be deleted soon to make room for new recordings, although it hasn't needed to do so yet.

This is not a problem; your TiVo won't actually delete recordings until it runs out of space. It is just telling you what will go first if/when it does.

On some shows, you select it from the menu, hit "play", and then immediately it brings up the "Delete this recording now/Don't delete" screen. I hit "Don't delete" and it says "Error playing a recording. The recording was not able to record this progrqam because there was no video signal on the channel. You may have been trying to record on a channel that you don't receive." I know this isn't the case, since it gets the beginning of the show on a previous recording. For example, I saw the beginning of "30 Rock" on the end of "The Office", but now "30 Rock" brings up the error message.

There is another problem with some recordings ("The Office" just recorded for example). When playing it back, you get to 8 minutes and it stops. You can't scan forward, but if you hit the "go to end" button, it jumps to the end. You can scan backwards to about 23 minutes in the recording and watch it from there. If you don't stop scanning backwards in time, it jumps to the beginning of the recording again and you have to navigate back to 23 minutes to see the end.

This sounds like a problem with your dish/signal, rather than the TiVo. Have you ever tried to watch one of these shows live?

One more thing, we have Vonage, so everytime I go to look at the list, I get the "you haven't connected your phone line, etc." msg. Minor inconvenience, but this direcTivo's phone line doesn't work with Vonage and doesn't connect with the web.

Dialing in constantly is not mission critical, but if you want to do it, you could try this:

http://www.weaknees.com/modem.php

[christockos]

Thanks for the reply Jeff.

I'm positive it is not a problem with my signal. As I said, the tuners work fine.

Also, you didn't address this issue:

On some shows, you select it from the menu, hit "play", and then immediately it brings up the "Delete this recording now/Don't delete" screen. I hit "Don't delete" and it says "Error playing a recording. The recording was not able to record this progrqam because there was no video signal on the channel. You may have been trying to record on a channel that you don't receive." I know this isn't the case, since it gets the beginning of the show on a previous recording. For example, I saw the beginning of "30 Rock" on the end of "The Office", but now "30 Rock" brings up the error message.

It is a very strange error. Any ideas?

thanks again

-chris

[christockos]

Jeff:

Also, none of these errors occurred before my Weak Knees upgrade. Bad hard drive maybe?

thanks