It is Monday morning and I have a rant about football, program guides, and technology. Ever since the big viewer outrage (at least 15 years ago) over CBS cutting off a Giants game (I think it was) to start the 60 minutes show at 7PM, all of the networks have allowed premiere sporting events to be viewed until their conclusion, and then start the next show. In today's world of DVRs where you can select a show by title and not have to worry about when it will air, I don't understand why the program guide cannot be updated in real time. I have a Season Pass for 60 minutes on Sundays at 7PM, however during football season it never starts at 7PM, yet the guide shows 7PM. This means that if I do not want to miss a 60 minute story, I have to add minutes or record the show after it. Why do the cable and satellite companies use arcane technology (batch processing) for updating their program guides. The television network control centers plan for the delay and should be able to provide an estimated lag time in real time to the program guide providers and in turn download the update to our DVRs. The DVR can then automatically adjust their recording times. This is not "rocket science"!
I have had fun playing with the iPhone last week. The touch interface and Safari browser are exceptional. It has it shortcomings (more to come on these, even the Apple store associates I have to talked to agree), however it does provide Apple with a truly innovative platform. After my post on the "irate Apple followers", the comments have been thoughtful and have forced me to refine or redefine my thinking about Apple, their products and overall strategy (I am not done commenting...). Even though they are a minor player in the desktop/laptop arena, the fact that they are the undisputed market leader with the iPod gives them a great deal of power in our personal digital lives. I am keenly interested on how they use that power, the iPhone is clearly a projection of that power. It is interesting to note that the Apple web site clearly lists OS X as the iPhone's operating system, yet the iPod Touch has no mention of an operating system. I would have thought that OS X would have also been used for the iPod Touch. Maybe this is just an oversight. If they are using OS X on the iPod Touch, this would clearly show a strategy of projecting OS X to new computing platforms which could be quite significant.
I finished my review of Ilium ListPro 5.0 and it should be published on pocketnow.com sometime this week.
This week:
- Continue my review of the Etymotic ety8 Bluetooth headphones.
- Continue my comparison of Windows Live Search and Google Maps for Windows Mobile.
My Directv HR20-700 Video and Audio Stutter Issues (Update 3)
Back in mid-September Directv released a new version of their software. After the automatic upgrade issues with my recordings started to occur. The video and audio would drop out and essentially stopping the playback from 2 to 5 seconds. This happened so many times that it made the viewing experience of recorded content lousy. I have had no issues with watching live TV, but I seldom do anymore other than for sporting events.
In mid-October Directv released version 0x0368 of their software. This version helped considerably but the problem was still very noticeable.
I have been a Directv customer for 14 years now, but with the onslaught of Verizon FIOS marketing, the fact that I have FIOS for internet and home phone service, I was starting to think hard about switching to their TV service. The two biggest issues I have had with switching are:
Yes, FIOS could work for me, but the overall Directv experience is better and their iPhone app is a great little tool. The forums like dbstalk.com have provided very little help other than to the RBR (Red Button Reset) the DVR. This seems to help a little but you have to do it almost daily so that is not a solution. As I was planning my potential move to FIOS, I decided to call Directv customer service to see what they would suggest (I have to say I was pretty skeptical). As I explained my problem, the CS person narrowed the potential issue down to the disk and suggested I run a disk scan and report any errors.
I ran the disk scan (RBR, wait on the "just a few more moments" message, press the front panel down key and record button simultaneously until the scan message comes up). It took 16 hours to scan my 1 Terabyte external hard drive. No errors were found, but the scan clearly resolved some issues.
Last night I started watching recorded programs and although not perfect there are no audio dropouts and the video stutters are blips that do not negatively impact the viewing experience.
Bottom line this clearly a disk related issue associated with the update and probably associated with the external drive functionality which is supposedly unsupported but operational.
Updates:
11/23/09: Good weekend for recorded material with only minor video and audio stutters. It was interesting that the hard drive started making quite a bit of noise again (I wonder what is going on, could it be defragmenting?), but if it makes things watchable I will live with (my DVR and HD are in a cabinet 20 feet away from my LCD panel). I may schedule another scan this week.
11/21/09: I ran another scan Wednesday night and last night watched 3 recorded shows. This seem to help quite a bit, I had 2 minor video/audio stutters on a 30 minute show. I will keep monitoring.
11/19/09: I am sorry to say that the video and audio dropouts/stutters are back when I watched 2 recorded shows last night. I had planned on running another scan and started it around 10PM last night. It is about 60% done this morning. If this does not work, I may purchase a Western Digital My DVR drive to see if that helps (I would need it anyway if I went to a Tivo/FIOS setup).
Note: BTW, I am using a special starter edition of Office 2010 (closed beta w NDA) to edit this blog post I created with Office 2007. It is funny to see the file being opened in compatibility mode.
Posted by sskarlatos on November 18, 2009 at 08:01 AM in Commentary, Directv, Tivo | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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