No signal, but recording anyway?

[tomhorsley]

My cable is literally broken, dangling in the wind at the top of the pole out back. The TiVo knows enough to say "searching for signal" on every channel, but I still see the red recording lights come on from time to time. Is it really recoding a few hours of no signal, or is it just telling me it is planning to record if the signal should happen to come back?

[lillevig]

Originally Posted by tomhorsley

My cable is literally broken, dangling in the wind at the top of the pole out back. The TiVo knows enough to say "searching for signal" on every channel, but I still see the red recording lights come on from time to time. Is it really recoding a few hours of no signal, or is it just telling me it is planning to record if the signal should happen to come back?

Does it come on at times when you have something set up to record in the "To Do" list? I've seen mine on at times during the middle of the night when nothing is scheduled to record so I've suspected that it was doing a SW update.

[tomhorsley]

Originally Posted by lillevig

Does it come on at times when you have something set up to record in the "To Do" list? I've seen mine on at times during the middle of the night when nothing is scheduled to record so I've suspected that it was doing a SW update.

It comes on both for scheduled recordings and for "suggestions", even though there is no signal to record. I haven't checked to see if any of these mythical recordings actually appear in my shows directory yet.

[moyekj]

Originally Posted by tomhorsley

It comes on both for scheduled recordings and for "suggestions", even though there is no signal to record. I haven't checked to see if any of these mythical recordings actually appear in my shows directory yet.

They don't. That's the annoying part. You walk by the unit and see red light(s) on and think great, it's recording as scheduled, I'll come back and watch later. Then you find out later recordings are missing from My Shows and check in Recording History that it actually didn't record anything due to lack of signal. i.e. It gives the impression everything is recording OK when nothing gets recorded.

[dwit]

It's not recording. Since it is scheduled to record, the light comes on, and stays on for the duration of the scheduled recording, but as long as there is no signal, no disk space is being used. If a signal were to be picked up during the period, the recording would start writing to disk.

If there was no signal for the entire period, nothing will be listed in Now Playing/My Shows and the To Do/Recording History will indicate "Not Recorded" because of no signal.

[cannonz]

Originally Posted by lillevig

Does it come on at times when you have something set up to record in the "To Do" list? I've seen mine on at times during the middle of the night when nothing is scheduled to record so I've suspected that it was doing a SW update.

It's recording infomercial.

[pmiranda]

This is my biggest complaint with TiVo for as long as I can remember... it knows that it's not getting the program, but it doesn't try to retune, and it lies about recording something until it's over and then silently deletes it.
This should be a big damn error message, not something it hides from you.
We get ads on every screen and messages every week or two about channel lineups changing, but cable could be out for a week and it will happily ignore it.

[L David Matheny]

Originally Posted by pmiranda

This is my biggest complaint with TiVo for as long as I can remember... it knows that it's not getting the program, but it doesn't try to retune, and it lies about recording something until it's over and then silently deletes it.
This should be a big damn error message, not something it hides from you.
We get ads on every screen and messages every week or two about channel lineups changing, but cable could be out for a week and it will happily ignore it.

I think that the way they handle a missing signal is not unreasonable. The TiVo does have a tuner dedicated to recording that channel for the duration of the show. What would it retune to? I suppose they could put a warning message up on the video outputs (live TV or whatever) to tell you that the signal is missing, but there's a good chance nobody would be there to see it anyway. At least if nothing at all gets recorded, the TiVo will try again later to record that show, assuming that it's on again.

I would like to see them automatically try again later even in the case where only part of a show records, or where there was a signal for the whole show but there were so many errors that it's pretty much unwatchable. I'm OTA only. I suppose the too-many-errors situation occurs rarely with cable.

[Rez]

Originally Posted by L David Matheny

I think that the way they handle a missing signal is not unreasonable. The TiVo does have a tuner dedicated to recording that channel for the duration of the show. What would it retune to?

Well, if you have to use a tuning adapter on your cable connection like I do, and that adapter fails to properly tune somewhere around 2% of the time like mine does - attempting to retune would let me get my requested show minus maybe the first 20 seconds. Instead I get a totally missed recorded with a notice that no signal was available. The TiVo should definitely attempt to re-tune when it finds no signal.

[steve614]

Originally Posted by Rez

Well, if you have to use a tuning adapter on your cable connection like I do, and that adapter fails to properly tune somewhere around 2% of the time like mine does - attempting to retune would let me get my requested show minus maybe the first 20 seconds. Instead I get a totally missed recorded with a notice that no signal was available. The TiVo should definitely attempt to re-tune when it finds no signal.

Have you put a lamp timer on your TA yet?
There's a thread around here somewhere about that.

[L David Matheny]

Originally Posted by Rez

Well, if you have to use a tuning adapter on your cable connection like I do, and that adapter fails to properly tune somewhere around 2% of the time like mine does - attempting to retune would let me get my requested show minus maybe the first 20 seconds. Instead I get a totally missed recorded with a notice that no signal was available. The TiVo should definitely attempt to re-tune when it finds no signal.

Yes, I didn't think of tuning adapter problems since I'm OTA only. You have my sympathy. Certainly TiVo needs to improve their software to do several quick retries followed by another retry every minute (say) for the duration of the recording until a signal is acquired.

[crxssi]

Originally Posted by Rez

Well, if you have to use a tuning adapter on your cable connection like I do, and that adapter fails to properly tune somewhere around 2% of the time like mine does - attempting to retune would let me get my requested show minus maybe the first 20 seconds. Instead I get a totally missed recorded with a notice that no signal was available. The TiVo should definitely attempt to re-tune when it finds no signal.

I have that issue on rare occasions, also. But the TiVo *does* attempt to retune- at least it says it does on the screen. Rarely seems to be successful, and I don't think it tries more than a few times and gives up. Each of the few times I have seen this/caught this, I was able to tune in on a SDV channel on the other tuner by just manually going there.

Thankfully, almost none of my important channels are SDV.

[Rez]

Originally Posted by steve614

Have you put a lamp timer on your TA yet?
There's a thread around here somewhere about that.

Hadn't seen that suggestion, I'll have to go do some searching.