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Not a show stopper, just an annoyance

dragnil

dragnil

Member
Title says it all but when I select a programme for recording I'm sometimes offered a "recommended" programme also. It's mildly irritating but more so because it's yet to recommend anything I'm remotely interested in ;)
Is there a setting I've not found or do I jusy take another patience and tolerance lesson from the other viewer?
 
I must admit that I rarely find the recommendations useful but it is a Freeview+ feature that Humax have to implement to get certification. I don't think there is any way of turning it off. Might be worth complaining to Freeview and the broadcasters about the poor quality of the recommendations.
 
and if you do accept the recommendation, it only schedules the one-off event and not the series. Not a lot of use.
 
Thanks for confirming what I thought would be the case. I'll make the point to Freeview.
I've had the HDR for a year now after a long time with the 9200 and I must say that all the other improvements seem to going in the right direction.
On a different tack we lost the first 30 mins or so of Inspector Montalbano (BBC4) last week. It's been recording the series quite happily until now, is there a way of discovering what time they actually transmitted it?
 
af123 said:
and if you do accept the recommendation, it only schedules the one-off event and not the series. Not a lot of use.
Click to expand...

oh, really? I actually selected a recommendation the other day for the missus.. will have to go back and set the whole series now!
 
This seems to be the great unanswered debate. I started by using padding as I did on the 9200, then tried AR and liked it until it failed to start at the right time - but I'd have had the same problem if I'd been using padding...
The whole Humax thing is good but this forum makes it a lot better (that's this year's compliment!).
 
dragnil said:
This seems to be the great unanswered debate.
Click to expand...
Indeed - and it's been debated at length, and at length on here over the past couple of years. Both methods have their proponents and each side finds it hard to see the other's point of view : )

The custom firmware has an extension called multimode which lets you pick padding and AR on a per channel basis so that you can force padding on those channels which aren't that reliable (yes, FIVE I'm looking at you).

You can also select padding and AR on a per-recording basis through the custom firmware web interface. Best of every world!
 
dragnil said:
This seems to be the great unanswered debate. I started by using padding as I did on the 9200, then tried AR and liked it until it failed to start at the right time - but I'd have had the same problem if I'd been using padding...
Click to expand...

But would you? Being BBC FOUR the programme more than likely started at the EPG time, it's just that the AR signals went wrong.

I have been using AR on my HDR No1 for some time, and it has been pretty good I have to say, but the No2 is on padding for one very good reason: when a non-technical user says "why didn't my programme record" it is much, much easier to explain and understand that it failed because the programme was broadcast at the wrong time, than to explain that the broadcaster caused the recording to fail even though the programme was broadcast at the right time.

It is the perspective I have, having been an engineer and a technical author, and a lot of exposure to the non-technically-minded - keep it simple stupid. AR would have to be utterly reliable before the unknowledgable ceased the urge to chuck the Humax out of the window.

I realise the technocrats have had enough of me banging in about it, but my comments are not meant for them!
 
I've never had a problem with AR and nor has my non-techy wife. Or at least I've never had a problem that couldn't be attributed to the after affects of auto-tune and multiple transmitter feeds.

With Padding surely when you watch the recording you have to wade through the extra stuff. i.e. if using 5 mins padding you would need to find the start of the program 5 minutes into the recording. That sounds like an utter pain and certainly not worth it for the high reliability of AR that I have experienced. Although I appreciate that if AR is not so reliable then it is a minor inconvenience compared with missing parts of the program.
 
Or indeed all of the programme. As you have not yet experienced a problem with AR, you have not yet experienced the collateral problem of explaining the missed soap episode.

Programmes rarely start early (maybe a minute in the case of The One Show), so my padding settings are -1+5. "Wading through" suggests you have not yet discovered the skip buttons or the time line.
 
We had problems at the beginning (many moons ago) when I did not know about the problems of multiple transmitter feeds and there were also a few oddities when it auto-retuned while we were on holiday recently and went back to receiving from multiple transmitters (though more issues with it losing the whole schedule! *). No problems either time with having to explain anything other than - it went wrong. So as far as I can see, AR works fine and we have had the machine a while now, I can't remember at present how long and would probably guess wildly wrong. Perhaps we don't record a huge number of programmes (or diversity of channels) compared to some people.

I use the skip buttons all the time, but would not choose to go back to having padding, which we did on our old recorder, with AR working as well as I have experienced. I will admit I was thinking of much larger padding times though, so your 1 min doesn't sound too bad.

* - and yes I am looking at installing CFW at some point to be able to better handle those things in the future.
 
I routinely get the program failed message on BBC3 + 4 broadcasts and very occasionally on other channels.
I have come to the conclusion (because of BBC3+4) it's nothing to care about as it causes no issues at all.
My suspicion is the fact that the humax expects the program to start at a specific time and if its clock
is a few seconds off or the BBC is early or late by a few seconds then the message is triggered because the box
looked for the start signal and missed it at a specific time.
Its the sort of non fatal bug I'd expect software developer to miss from time to time.
Either way - I just ignore it

I have been padding 5 before and 5 after since I bought the box (some of my users do the same) and the only genuine issues
I've ever seen are two programs back to back on the same channel when another is also recording - that can cause the unusual
message of "a recording failed due to one of higher priority" but I've not have the recording actually failing
And at one time I had another problem that others reported here but I forget what it was.
Its no big deal to press a button 5 times to skip to the start but then I dont watch much TV anyway - I expect it may annoy
people if they watch a lot.

I'm suprised that so many people seem to have so much trouble with this issue.
I have far more trouble with my parents sky box locking up than with the humax.

My advice to people now is to install the custom FW and enjoy the box - (the features and reliability of the custom
firmware make this box into something quite special)
 
Recommended Programmes

Waste of processing power. But then again I am not an impulsive recorder; I review the week's programmes and update timers accordingly.

AR

With everything there must be a failure rate.

So far, AR has worked flawlessly on my HD and HDR, excluding unattended DSO events. I record the main channels, including 5, as well as BBC3, BBC4, Film4, Dave, Pick TV, Yesterday, Quest, ITV2. Most are series recordings.

I always manually tune because I can receive from multiple transmitters.

Is the back-to-back recording plus another peculiar to padding? Does it result in a complete recording failure?

Martin
 
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