So I have Comcast. I’ve had a series recording forever for the PBS News Hour. All of a sudden, it won’t record it. I just noticed that even though I have it as a series recording, it isn’t one my scheduled recordings.
So, I did the Windows fix. I deleted the series recording, and then set it up again. But that didn’t work. I can set it up day-by-day, but it wont’ let me set up a series recording. Which, btw, I’ve had for something like 10 years.
Comcast just doesn’t want me to record the PBS News Hour. Why?
This. Real conversation with the Comcast repairman last Friday after my phone and internet were out for three days:
“You see our bucket truck that comes around checking the box up on the pole? When they tested it the other day they found that your line had some noise on it and while it didn’t affect you it gave your neighbors lousy TV reception.”
“So what? I don’t like my neighbors.”
“So they put a pink tag on yours and shut it off.”
“They didn’t fix it? And they didn’t tell anybody that they shut me off so I had to call for service and wait for you to come around to figure out what happened?”
“Did you hear that we’re doubling all our customers’ internet speed?”
I have TWC. I have my DVR set to series record Sparticus.
The other week it didn’t record. Thankfully, I was home at the time. When I went to look at the TV guide, it usually says either: Sparticus New: blah, blah blah. Or it says: Sparticus Repeat: Blah, blah, blah.
The time it didn’t want to record the TV guide said Sparticus HD: blah, blah, blah. I had to start the recording manually. Despite the fact that it was indeeed a new episode.
I’m not sure if the DVR searches for the key word “New” off of the TV guide or not but it seems logical that it would. Check your TV guide listing, see if it still looks the same. (This assumes you knew what it looked like before.)
Actually, I noticed the same thing about Jeopardy! on my Comcast DVR; it was set to record all new episodes, but yesterday I noticed that the subscription was gone, and it wouldn’t let me reestablish it. Sometimes this is a temporary glitch and the subscription returns after a day or so.
I have had Comcast refuse to let me record things - or perhaps the DVR - there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason. It actually shows a cancel icon (circle with line thru it).
I have a Tivo, I have learned from experience and from the interwebs that Tivo does not use any human-readable field from the program listings to determine whether a program is new or a rerun. Apparently there is a flag hidden somewhere in the listings that Tivo uses.
Your DVR may or may not work the same way.
I just know that my Tivo insists on recording the Castle reruns at midnight.
No, the DVR does not search the description text for the world “new” or anything else. Behind the scenes, DVRs have data about every program, movie, series, etc. in a software-readable form that is essentially like (or actually is) fields in a database. There’s a “record” for every series, a “record” for every episode of that series, etc. In the record for an episode, there will be a field for the title of the series (e.g. “PBS News Hour”, or maybe a “pointer” to the series record), a field for the title of the particular episode (e.g. “The One About News”), a field that indicates whether this episode is new or rerun, a field that has the channel it’s on, a field that has the start time, etc. things like the description (which would be in another field) that are text are written by people (at least at some point up the line). The word “New” or “Rerun” that appears in the description might be added manually or automatically, but the DVR certainly never looks for that, it uses the field in the data record. it’s not uncommon, especially for shows like “PBS News Hour”, “The Daily Show”, etc. that are on multiple days a week, for the appearance of “New” or “Rerun” in the description to not even match what’s in the data that the DVR actually uses.
Right, but just because the description says “new” does not at all mean that the data that the DVR actually uses also marks it as new. Try changing the options on your series recording to record “new and reruns” (or whatever Comcast calls it) and see if that fixes the problem.
This is one reason I don’t hardly ever bother with series recordings. I just go through each night and manually choose what to record for the following night. Only if it’s something I’m likely to forget (like a weekly show on sat mornings) do I use a series recording.
I can explain this a bit, since I used to work for a Scumcast contractor doing signal noise mitigation back in 2006.
They go up the pole at the node or the amplifier (big silver boxes) and hook up a spectrometer. That measures the signal noise in the entire node. If it’s too high, they send guys out to each point on that branch of the line to start disconnecting stuff until they find the one (or however many) lines that cause the biggest amount of signal noise.
At that point, they should knock on the door and see if anyone is home at the houses where the signal noise is coming from. If not, they tag it (in your case with a pink tag), leave a door tag on the front door saying “Call us for maintenance!”, and wait for the service call. Signal noise is caused by something inside a customer’s house: a bad splitter, a bad TV (typically an old CRT TV), DIY fittings with shroud hanging out, etc. They can’t fix it without going inside the house. They should communicate this with their customers better, but they’re trying to address issues in entire neighborhoods. Plus, Scumcast usually wants their in-house techs (who are MUCH better) going in for repair/service calls instead of contractors.
Does the Comcast DVR let you set up a manual recording? If so just tell it the channel, time, and duration and you should be good.
I had to do that on Tivo to more reliably get Family Guy on Sunday nights. It’s on at 9:00 and lasts 30 minutes, but sports showing before it often ran long and messed up the schedule. So I set up a manual 1 hour recording at 9:00 on that channel.
The problem begins with “Comcast” and ends with “DVR.” Why anyone would pay $60-100 a month for cable, and more to keep the hotbox powered 24/7/365, is completely beyond me.
This week, my Comcast DVR (yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m a sucker who pays too much for TV and should be doing some damn thing over the internet instead; let’s call that a given) did the same thing! It’s been refusing to record the news, even though I’ve had a series recording set up forever. It looks like there’s a series recording; it asks me if I want to record the series with the settings I’ve chosen; then it shows up as if I’ve just set it to record the one episode.
And I like MLB - which MLB.tv delivers, both realtime, delayed and archived, without commercials, for $25 a month. I believe all the sports have similar offerings, and they tend to be more inclusive and complete than even the add-on cable packages. For one thing, I can watch baseball from either the home or away feed, meaning I can listen to my beloved Kruk and Kuip instead of whatever morons handle the Cincy games, or shudder the dimbulbs on ESPN.
Unless you watch a lot of channels all the time - and some do - streaming has reached the point where you can a la carte your viewing from superior sources (= no ads of any kind, and exceptional “on demand” capability negating the need for a DVR) for much less than cable’s megafeed. At worst, in some busy months, your streaming costs might touch cable costs, but it’s still superior delivery and only the stuff you’re watching, so other months will be cheaper.
Cable has its place for many folks, but if you’re a selective viewer… the time to look at alternatives is here.
