I’ve had two DirecTV receivers in the past 12 years. A Sony kit I bought at Best Buy (came with a single LAN Dish & wire) in 1997. Then DirecTV updated my receivers and a dual LAN dish in 2005.
I’m curious if Dish Networks receivers are this time stupid too?
Both were just time stupid. Let’s say it’s 8:57 pm and your favorite show comes on at 9pm. You press the buttons to get in the program guide, navigate to the program you want, and press select. It slaps you down with a silly error and brings up the scheduler screen. Do you want to schedule a viewing at 9 pm?
WTF does it think you want to do? :smack: The show starts in three frigging minutes.
iF IT’S 9:01 and you go into the guide, it will immediately change the channel when you press select. Three minutes early and the box is too stupid to default.
Is there a technical reason the receivers programming can’t take
(current time - schedule time) < 5 minutes
IF True, change the channel?
I wrote a lot of forms for our data entry process early in my programming career. Defaults are part of any good design. Entering time sheets for the 12th payroll? The user enters RG12. The form displays the pay date as 6/30/11. We ran semi-monthly, starting 1/1. Twelfth payroll is always paid on 6/30 of whatever the system date (year) is. RG23 payroll runs 12/15.
That’s basic programming 101. A table lockup with 24 possible entries.
Why does the programming in satellite receivers suck so bad?
Tv shows end three minutes before the hour and go to commercial break.
When the show ends, I immediately go into the program guide and decide what I want to view next. Typically thats a minute or two before the hour.
Instead, I have to sit there twiddling my thumbs until preciously 9:00 and then go into the guide and select a show.
I’ve put up with this crap for 13 years. You’d think by now the programming in the receiver would be a bit more intelligent.
I put a lot of thought into designing professional computer forms. Getting the defaults right is a critical part of the design. Crap programming in a receiver bugs me.
While I’m in the program guide, I’ll note the channel or network. Exit the guide.
Then press the channel numbers. A minor PITA but better than having to schedule a show that starts in three minutes.
This is a minor annoyance. I’m just curious why the dumb ass that programmed the receiver software didn’t include defaults. like giving a five minute window before asking to schedule something.
The software gets update by DirecTV. The box downloads updates automatically. They’ve never fixed this silly issue.
Not always. It’s becoming more and more frequent for one show to go immediately into the next. Sometimes they’ll even overlap, with the closing credits on the bottom or side of the screen while the next show has already begun on larger part of the screen. I think it is the executives’ way of trying to get us to not change the channel.
My old satellite receiver did exactly as you mentioned in the OP. But since we upgraded about 3 or 4 years ago it now will default to the selected channel with no scheduling required. I don’t know what the cut-off time is, but certainly within 5 minutes there’s no further scheduling required.
This is on Motorola receivers (for Shaw Direct, previously Starchoice) in Canada though. You might find that newer models for your DirecTV system have also been upgraded. Who makes the DirecTV receiver?
My Dish box will be showing and defaulted into the current half-hour time block. ie: if it’s 8:58, it will come up in the 8:30 column. This way, if I scroll through the listings and find something, I can just hit Enter and go to that channel to see the last moments of the previous program’s end credits. No waiting needed.
I have seen cable boxes that stop displaying the current time’s listings a few minutes before the hour, which would be irritating since it forces you to either schedule the box to switch to that channel in 30 seconds or so, or exit the guide and manually enter the channel number.
