Lost Signal

[freedml]

Does SageTV ever look to see if there is any signal or how good it is? The connection came loose from one of my tuners and it obviously couldn't record anything. SageTV should give some warning that it isn't getting any signal, either on a particular tuner (and use another one if available) or for a particular channel (and flag it as unreliable in the channel lineup).

[Brent]

No Sage doesn't have any way of notifying you when your cable comes loose from the connector. Channels that have a bad signal should be consistently bad so you can detect that when you setup your guide channels &/or remove them from the lineup if that's a problem.

[freedml]

Well, SageTV SHOULD look at signal quality and try to find the same program on another channel (either at the same time, sometimes later). There's not much point in recording 'snow'.

And, I expect computer programs to do things like keeping track of what's working and what's not. If SageTV finds that one tuner has no signal on any channel, it should tell the user, not just keep recording snow. If a particular station is unreliable because of weather or whatever, it should tell the user. With your reasoning, there would have been no reason to setup an automatic 'channel search' to setup the tuners.

[Brent]

Maybe it should, but I challenge you to find a single HTPC/PVR software program or even a DVR/Tivo box that does that.

[freedml]

I'm not going to go looking. If SageTV were first, wouldn't that be great? Patent it and then sue Tivo when they copy it!

[Brent]

Originally Posted by freedml

I'm not going to go looking. If SageTV were first, wouldn't that be great? Patent it and then sue Tivo when they copy it!

Agreed - it would be a nice feature addition.

[pjpjpjpj]

While it would be a nice idea... the issue would be this: a channel is having a small issue right at the beginning of the recording period (I've seen stations have a few seconds of blank screen "on the hour" when a show is about to start; probably when they show a local commercial and then switch to the national network feed). Sage sees the dead air, thinks the station is not working, and searches for another showing. It finds none, so it just quits. But the show was just fine, so you miss it for no reason.

Obviously a cure would be an adjustable timeout - maybe a full 5 or 10 minutes. But this could still be an issue with OTA users - if there is a storm that is causing some digital pixellization or whatever, for 10 minutes, but it clears up when the storm passes. Say you were recording the Olympics for 8 hours and the first 10 minutes (all intro chat anyway) had caused it to quit, for example.

It just seems like the function might cause more heartache by skipping shows it shouldn't, than the heartache of finding a hour of snow in your recordings....

[freedml]

Ok, you agree it's a good idea, so let's flesh out the problems.

IF another reliable channel has the same program, record it there. If not, keep recording on this channel -- you're right, who knows, it may come back to life.

MARK the bad channel as having had a problem. Have a 'problem' icon on that program and/or the main menu which you click to get the error log/message.

CHECK all the channels maybe once a day for signal strength when nothing else is going on.


Let's not be "gee it's great when it works but...". I'd prefer "SageTV is really on top of things"

[planetc]

You need a PA not a PVR me thinks? ;-)