Switched Digital Video and long recordings

[bialio]

Turns out my cable box does SDV for some of the channels - which in general usage has no impact, but I recently discovered when recording a show that is 3 hours or longer on a 'Switched' channel, the cable box puts up a "Are you still there?" kind of message, and if you don't respond tunes the box to some other channel.

Anyone seen this before? Or found a way to work around it with Sage?

I don't record really long stuff very often so it's not a big deal, but it is a pain to have the last 2 hours of a Golf Tournament turn into Keeping Up with the Kardashians....

[wayner]

Beware of this next weekend for the Ryder Cup as the coverage can be as much as 12 hours in one "program". But hopefully they don't have NBC on SDV, do they?

[KryptoNyte]

Mine occurs at 4 hours. When I have a recording that's going to run for more than 4 hours, I set it up as two or three timed recordings instead.

[robk]

Don't you love it when you play back a recording and halfway through you see "Press A to continue", followed by "Channel unavailable at this time"?

Krypto- when you break up the recording into one hour segments, do you have to have "always tune channel" on in an effort to "keep alive"? Does it make a difference? Anyone figure out what triggers the "are you there" message? My BrightHouse account seems to do it randomly - I thought of sending an "A" every hour or so automatically (I have both FW tuning and a USB-UIRT for receive only) but if the box isn't asking for an "A", it brings up a menu, so no good. I wonder if the message could be detected somehow and automatically respond with "A".

Rob