Successful Recording When on Holiday? A Question

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Successful Recording When on Holiday? A Question

(23 posts)

davidrew

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This may be a very simple question but how should we set-up our 5000T so it records more than two days of programmes after we leave it alone for a ten day holiday?

Came back today to find the 5000T stuck in standby (red light) and needed a 13amp reset to get it going again. No power failures whilst away.

Current set-up:
> Power on/off timer for 0500 to 0530 on BBC1 HD to refresh EPG daily.
> CEC Disabled so TV/AMP not randomly powered on during above timer.
> Connected via HDMI to AMP
> Dedicated TV cable input with attenuator to reduce signal. Passthrough cable connected to TV from 5000T

Frustrated to say the least as its the second time this year its packed-up after two days left on its own and some missed programmes are not available on catch-up.

Thinking about putting in a time switch to remove power at 0300 everyday for 5 minutes for force a reset but then on reflection seems a bit old tech for what is supposed to be best box on the market.

| Thu 20 Sep 2018 22:06:03 #1 |
grahamlthompson

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Have you by any chance got start and end recordings set to anything other than auto ?

| Fri 21 Sep 2018 8:25:06 #2 |
davidrew

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Start & End Padding Time are both set to Auto.

For information a factory reset was done after it failed to record on the first holiday. It has been recording fine again since the 13amp reset yesterday.

| Fri 21 Sep 2018 13:27:41 #3 |
grahamlthompson

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davidrew - 19 minutes ago »
Start & End Padding Time are both set to Auto.
For information a factory reset was done after it failed to record on the first holiday. It has been recording fine again since the 13amp reset yesterday.

Can you try this after leaving the box alone for two days. Pull the aerial out before booting. and ignore the no signal message and press guide. How many days of info have you got in the guide. I wonder if a recent upgrade or hardware failure has broken the epg cache.

| Fri 21 Sep 2018 13:54:03 #4 |
davidrew

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Not sure when this will be but will try this and report back the results.

The idea of the half hour daily on/off timer was to ensure the EPG (and cache) was populated but maybe half an hour is not enough?

I have posted about erratic EPG population before in response to the FVP-5000T EPG losing programme information thread and I am tempted to try FrankLeigh's 'fix' of reducing the channel list.

Hopefully there will be a firmware/software update soon that will fix the erratic EPG population and check the cache is consistent and take appropriate action if its not.

Thanks for the suggestions

| Fri 21 Sep 2018 16:39:50 #5 |
REPASSAC

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I do not have this kit but a suggestion - when going on holiday ensure left on a BBC HD channel (Faster EPG population).

| Fri 21 Sep 2018 17:37:19 #6 |
davidrew

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The on/off timer is set for BBC1 HD (101) so hopefully that one is already covered off.

Thanks for the suggestion.

| Fri 21 Sep 2018 17:58:54 #7 |
grahamlthompson

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davidrew - 2 hours ago »
Not sure when this will be but will try this and report back the results.
The idea of the half hour daily on/off timer was to ensure the EPG (and cache) was populated but maybe half an hour is not enough?
I have posted about erratic EPG population before in response to the FVP-5000T EPG losing programme information thread and I am tempted to try FrankLeigh's 'fix' of reducing the channel list.
Hopefully there will be a firmware/software update soon that will fix the erratic EPG population and check the cache is consistent and take appropriate action if its not.
Thanks for the suggestions

If it's any help this issue has effected other Humax Boxes, which from your response you must have read the other posts.

I have a 5000T which like your's has the wake up to refresh the epg. When padding was enabled using the aerial out dodge did reveal the epg shrinking by 24 hrs every day. I have the wake up programmed every day and no padding, and have just been away for more than 7 days, resulting ON THE 8th day recordings failing to record. recordings Not sure if a 4000T update has broken this,

Can only suggest you put the box in sby overnight and remove the aerial to prevent the current mux on boot reboot preventing the epg refresh from the current mux.

TBH this is this is this is rather sad, this problem was identified a long time ago withe the HDR-FOX-T2 Freeview+ boxes ans replicated on the 5000T boxes. Humax recyling duff subroutines already known as flawed.

Without Barry we may never Know.

| Fri 21 Sep 2018 19:43:39 #8 |
Faust

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Youview had a very big issue with the EPG failing to populate properly when coming out of 'smart standby' earlier this year. Took five months to fix the issue which was traced back to a fault deep within Humax's own firmware.

This was the official response -

For those with a technical interest – as we mentioned before the root of the issue was found within the set top box scheduling software (common to all STB types) which led to deadlocked or “empty” events being created for some scheduled recordings, even when they had previously worked before.

Why that happened seems to have been due to an intermittent but persistent failure to deal with changes in EIT P/F information from the broadcast transmission data. The fix that has been implemented involved a significant rewrite of the scheduler code that will avoid these types of failures in the future.

| Fri 21 Sep 2018 21:53:11 #9 |
davidrew

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We may be very naïve, but isn't the whole basic concept of these PVR's to allow us to set a recording schedule and then forget about it? Then the PVR records TV/Radio when we are home or away based on that schedule and then we watch it when we want to? Or have we missed somthing?

There should not be a constant requirement to keep prodding the box with on/off timers, 13amp resets etc. etc. to keep it going. Clearly some of the backend programming/firmware is defective and needs fixing. Humax are capable of this as our Freesat HDR-1000S was much more reliable and did at least record the schedule when left alone, we only moved to the 5000T for the additional tuner/parallel recording capabilities and Channel 4HD/All4.

Lets hope Humax have some fixes in the pipeline soon that will actually give us the basic functionality we paid for without having to resort to our own cumbersome workarounds to try and make it work.

Rant over .. We are going to introduce a time switch to power off the 5000T for 5 minutes every 24 hours early in the morning and extend the on/off timer to 1 hour a day on BBC1HD to try and keep the EPG better updated.

Will update with progress if we make any.

| Sun 23 Sep 2018 23:40:21 #10 |