To my knowledge, no other human has had access to the TV/Remote/DVR since it was installed last April.
JonesJ2205–I don’t know what web based scheduling is in this context, but the TV/DVR is not connected to the internet, and is not even connected to a telephone line most of the time. I was told that sometimes it will display a message indicating it needs a telephone connection for some sort of “update”, but that has not happened but once, several months ago. I do not have any sort of home network–my computer uses a dial up connection, and is not connected to the television in any way. Neither is my cell phone.
It’s amazingly easy to accidentally set a recording. A few months ago, I was wondering why my wife was taping Days of our Lives or something like that in the middle of the day. I let it go for a while then asked her. Then it was taping something really weird. Once again we didn’t set it. Then one day I watched my 18 month old set it up to record Oprah. She has no idea what she is doing except that pressing the buttons on the remote makes it do things on the screen. Now she does it all the time.
OTOH, occasionally, the DVR will record an infomercial for a DishNetwork product all on it’s own. It happens. I doubt that the generic DVR you got with your service does the fancy personality assessment that Tivo does. I’ll bet you just have a box like I do.
Football, History Channel, bacon chocolate, sounds like me!!
I have had a Dish Network DVR for quite some time now and have never had this happen. there are the occasional 5 second ads that Dish will record telling you to subscribe to some package, but nothing like your post.
I do, however, have mine hooked up to a phone line and it updates every moring at 3 am. I am frequently awake and watching tv at that time and was always annoyed, but the updates may be a good thing. I would say let the damn thing update itself. That may be the problem.
BTW, in my opinion, the Dish Network 2-room HD DVR is the best piece of technology that exists today. One little box can be recording 2 different programs. In HD. At the same time, you can be in each of the two rooms watching entirely different recorded programs. In HD.
It’s kinda easy to do this sort of thing accidentally. Here’s a pretty common way it might have happened:
You’re hopping around the channel guide, looking for something to watch. You see an interesting show, and push “right” on the four-way pad to see when it ends. So, now the guide is displaying future shows, rather than what’s on right now.
Neglecting to push “left” to go back to the current time, you keep searching, and there’s O’Reilly. “Huh”, you think, “I wonder what dumbassery he’s up to today.” But somehow, you push the center “select” button instead of the “info” button, and since it’s a future show, the DVR series record screen pops up. By default, the DVR has checked “record all episodes”, since it’s a recurring series (it defaults to “once” for movies). Absentmindedly, you again hit “select” instead of “exit”.
And that’s it. Two mistaken button presses, and your DVR is set to record every episode of O’Reilly.
You’ve already ruled it out, but I was going to suggest checking with any practical joker type friends.
There’s a guy I hang out with and once or twice a year I’ll set him up to record Ghost Hunters or Keeping Up With the Kardashians or some equally mindless drivel.
I have a DVR from Dish also, and it has never been plugged into a phone line. I don’t watch Dish on Demand or any pay movies. A nice feature - no central Tivo HQ is recording my preferences. BTW, I thin TiVo is suing Dish, so our machines are definitely not TiVos.
Do you have the cheap one like I have, or the fancy one that lets you watch live TV while recording another program?
For the cheap one, my best guess about the explanation would be that you had the satellite box on guide, with the TV off, and then accidentally sat on the remote. I think a few clicks of the select button would do what you saw. I’ve never had to hit “record” to record something except right then - I’ve pressed that button less than half a dozen times since I got the DVR. There is a sequence in Zits this week on butt dialing - maybe you butt recorded.
Seconding the vote for this being accidental. Maybe you sat on the remote, or dropped it somehow. It’s surprisingly easy to do. Somehow I once started recording the horse racing channel. Since the only show on that channel is “Horse Racing” it filled up the DVR very fast.
I can watch live TV while recording another program, and have done this occasionally, usually when there was something I wanted to watch on during Monday Night Football. I’d watch the game, and record the other program…think I had to do that for The Prisoner. Also did it for LOTR: Return of the King, which was on during Sunday Night Football, I think.
Do you live in reasonably close proximity to others? Can you ascertain if they too have Dish TV? The reason I ask is that the Dish receiver / dvr system that I have is set up to output to 2 televisions using a single receiver box. The second TV is in a different part of the house but is connected to the system via coax cable. The significant thing here though is that the second remote control communicates with the receiver / DVR using an RF signal so that it can travel through walls and floors. Perhaps a right-wing neighbor has a remote for her second TV that uses the same RF frequency as yours. Perhaps she set the timer on his/her DVR and your DVR at the same time.
I got a little more curious about my theroy so I did a little googling and I found this procedure for changing the signal your reciever / second remote uses. So if this is the cause it should be easy to remedy.
We had this happen a lot when our next door neighbors got Dish, What was weird was when we changed our frequency, and then, later got the same interference again. We must have been giving them problems, and they just randomly picked the same frequency number.