Missed recordings - Odd explanations on Recording History

[lmk911]

I missed "Planet Earth: The Making Of" (DSC) because supposedly the tuner was unavailable, "Edmond" (SHOH) and "Meltdown: A Global Warming" (SCI) because the power was lost or the recorder was unplugged. I know there is no way recorder was unplugged and the power was not lost because it is on a UPS. In addition, I was catching up on "House" from the Now Playing List when this supposed power loss was to have occurred. As for the tuner being unavailable, Planet Earth was the only show scheduled and I have dual tuners.

One more odd thing is both Edmond and Meltdown were still on the To Do List until I reset the recorder.

Does anyone have any ideas about what happened and how I can prevent this in the future?


TIA

[JimSpence]

Since those shows were still in the TDL until you did a restart, that indicates to me that it partially lost its indexing data. The unit reported in the History the best it could.. Restarts fix these weird problems.

[lmk911]

Thanks Jim.

[juanian]

I find that a TiVo will start to exhibit odd behavior if it has not been restarted occasionally. I seem to recall some oddity like that ("power was lost") happening to me a long time ago; it was also the one time I left my TiVo in Standby mode when I went out of town (the TiVo didn't record most of the shows I had scheduled for it to record :( ). Since then, I have found that restarting my TiVos every few weeks seems to prevent these kinds of oddities from occurring.

I have been having a problem that still occasionally occurs, and might be loosely related to your problem. I think there is a TiVo bug where it will not play some items in the Now Playing list, even though the shows were probably successfully recorded. Attempting to play the recordings, I get the message "Error playing a recording/The TiVo DVR was not able to record this program because there was no video signal on the channel."

From what I can tell, the TiVo did successfully record the program, but for some reason it just won't play (or MRV) the program.

Reasons for my assumptions:
1: The TiVo with the recording use the A/V RCA jacks:
As long as the digital cable box is turned on, there is always a signal; plus, when the cable box changes the channel, an info banner appears as part of the video output. (If the cable box is turned off, the TiVo does record 'black', and does not produce the error message (the cable box still sends an 'empty' video feed); recordings made with the cable box unplugged don't get an entry in the Now Playing list, and get an entry in the History that says "This program was not recorded because the video signal was unavailable.".)

2: The recording's Disk Usage matches the size if it had properly recorded the show:
An hour long show normally takes about 0.74 GB at Basic; shows on that TiVo with the "no video signal" message also occupy that same size. (Recordings made with the cable box turned off are substantially smaller in size -- the 'empty' video feed is recorded by the TiVo and is compressed significantly.)

3: The next recording made directly after the 'failed' recording shows the tail end of the previous program:
There is a multi-second 'lag' between the time the TiVo starts recording, and when the IR Blaster changes the channel to the channel desired for the new recording. In this time, you can see whatever channel the cable box is tuned to, plus the banner of the channel being changed. I was recording a marathon of shows on the same channel, and one recording in the middle of the marathon was flagged with this 'no video signal' error.

This happens about once every few months. I have not seen it occur with 8.3 yet. (I still have a recording on my TiVo that is flagged with this "no video signal" error, because the program will probably never be repeated, and I am hoping that something can be done in the future to be able to recover the program.)