Time Warner set-top-box shenanigans

[KryptoNyte]

Well, today I setup SageTV to record 24 hours of straight Lemans racing. At about the 3 to 4 hours mark, the Time Warner set-top-box decided that it would require user input to continue playing the Lemans race. With my HD-PVR recording the event in my absence, the Time Warner set top box decided to STOP broadcasting the event.

Is there something I am missing on the STB setup that disables this kind of bullcrap? Wow, this issue has me really hot, any help would be much appreciated ...

[KryptoNyte]

... yeah, that's right ... I said it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFZG8KQJni8

[sumrtym]

Interesting. What box? I've fallen asleep in front of mine a lot of times and the box just keeps on chugging.

[KryptoNyte]

First I get this

[KryptoNyte]

Which turns into this

[KryptoNyte]

And then the unit goes into screen saver mode where the Time Warner logo dances around the screen.

If I had *ANY* option other than Time Warner for my television service, I would drop TW in an instant.

What is it that makes a company whose primary business was originally to provide cable service to the masses, and turn them into a monopoly of forced DVR box rentals?

Greed.

On a typical day, I would tell the government and the FCC to keep their hands out of private business, but in this case, where there are situations when competition isn't available, it would be nice to give a helping hand to the public.

[KeithAbbott]

Sorry, can't help with your STB problem.

But I did want to say how awesome it is watching Lemans in HD, I particularly liked the one full lap with the Corvette's in-car camera, with no announcer, just the sounds of that incredible engine.

The only other thing that Speed coulda done better overall, is display the car telemetry along with the in-car camera. I thought they did that in previous races, maybe I'm thinking of the 24 hours at Daytona...

p.s. And the commercials are killing me.

[KryptoNyte]

Oh sure, rub it in, Keith!

[KryptoNyte]

Originally Posted by sumrtym

Interesting. What box? I've fallen asleep in front of mine a lot of times and the box just keeps on chugging.

4640HDC

[korben_dallas]

My SageTV setup has been having a tuner problems since the last Time Warner updates on my 4250HDC & 3250HD about 3 months ago. I get the same warning you get but typically it goes away during the show. However, often the boxes will go to sleep with no warning and revert to 480i output which seems to cause the HD-PVRs trouble re-initializing. Many mornings I'm now turning off the STBs, then turning them back on, then changing them to an HD channel so they'll behave for the day. Also have them on wake timers for 5pm. Unfortunately lost a show Sunday morning cause one STB was asleep again.

Silly cable companies futzing. The STBs won't even show the volume setting on the front panel now.

[big poppa pump]

Looks like a SDV issue. Channels on SDV will need user interaction from time to time, else you end up getting messages like the one you got. Unfortunately, there is no way for the cable company to know you are still watching the channel, unless you keep sending occasional key presses to the STB.

[big poppa pump]

Originally Posted by korben_dallas

My SageTV setup has been having a tuner problems since the last Time Warner updates on my 4250HDC & 3250HD about 3 months ago. I get the same warning you get but typically it goes away during the show. However, often the boxes will go to sleep with no warning and revert to 480i output which seems to cause the HD-PVRs trouble re-initializing. Many mornings I'm now turning off the STBs, then turning them back on, then changing them to an HD channel so they'll behave for the day. Also have them on wake timers for 5pm. Unfortunately lost a show Sunday morning cause one STB was asleep again.

Silly cable companies futzing. The STBs won't even show the volume setting on the front panel now.

I see you are using a 64 bit OS, so pity you can't use firewire channel changing for your TWC boxes. I used to see similar issues on my TWC STB till about a year back till I came up with a foolproof way to make sure my box is never asleep and so far I haven't missed a single recording. What I do is:

1) Execute a batch command at 0800 hrs and 1600 hrs daily, which wakes up my STB (if its asleep or TWC decided to do overnight updates) and changes the channel and parks it on channel '03' (SD channel). By doing this I don't have to worry about SDV coming into play since none of SD channels are on SDV. If any of my recordings need to tune a SDV channel, the channel changes are executed via firewire properly.

2) Additionally, when my pc sends the channel change command to the STB, it does it twice with a gap of 5 seconds, so if for some odd reason, I miss a digit or get the 480i issue, it gets resolved when the channel change command is sent the 2nd time.

[wayner]

You have a USB-UIRT right? There is an exe file that works with the USB-UIRT that is called uutx.exe that will send an IR command to the box. If you send a command, like the "Enter" key every hour then perhaps you could keep the box alive. This could be done via a Scheduled Task in Windows.

Another way to do this would be to write a script in SJQ. Slugger has written a script that keeps your box alive that gives you an example of how to send IR codes via a groovy script. You could always adapt his code to run on a cron job and to send a key press, or even to change the channel to something else and then change it back immediately.

FWIW I potentially have this issue as well since some of my channels are SDV and similar message come up on my boxes which are also SA (aka Cisco) devices. But I haven't recorded really long shows on an SDV channel. I am a golf fan so occasionally there will be days like the US Open (yesterday) or the Ryder Cup with 6 hour telelcast but they are generally on network channels and not SDV.

The brute force way to deal with this is to create manual 4 hour recordings, or whatever, instead of just selecting the one 24 hour program. This also has the advantage of breaking up the file into smaller pieces rather than having one massive file that could be 100GB or so in size.

@Kryptonite - See this post as well http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...975#post531975

[KryptoNyte]

Thank you, wayner, you've been very helpful in many posts of the past. I'll look into that keep alive situation. In the meantime, I've decided to just run long recordings as timed recordings less than 4 hours, which is the time at which the STB asks for user input.

For you other folks having trouble with the 480i bug, I always make sure that my USB-UIRT sends the "enter" command prior to the channel change which pulls the unit out of 480i mode and makes sure I don't miss the first digit of the channel change (pretty much the reason why I bought the USB-UIRT).

[doc]

There's this thread too. I've never tried it, don't know if its still current or not but worth a browse

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35228

[gabrielcab]

I use Sage SQJ to send the channel "000" every 2 hours and it has worked very good for me for months.