ITV4 is driving me mental with bad 'PDC' and 'Series' tagging

Now we have something / quite-a-lot to discuss and celebrate.
Brucey
Posts: 44517
Joined: 4 Jan 2012, 6:25pm

Re: ITV4 is driving me mental with bad 'PDC' and 'Series' tagging

Post by Brucey »

just as a test, I recorded 'minder' on ITV4 earlier this afternoon, using a once-only PDC enabled timer recording from the EPG. Needless to say the recording finished before the show did, so I never got to find out what 'Arfer' did with his wrong colour paint. Vuelta is recording as I write this; goodness knows if the recording will be complete or if it will terminate early, which has happened with many (most) day's coverage thus far....?

cheers
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Brucey~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
hamster
Posts: 4131
Joined: 2 Feb 2007, 12:42pm

Re: ITV4 is driving me mental with bad 'PDC' and 'Series' tagging

Post by hamster »

It's odd. I have a Panasonic Freeview box and never get these problems. Similarly in the past my TVOnics box (a company founded by former Sony engineers in Wales) was also reliable on recording, although it would occasionally record repeats.
The main issue is how companies interpret the spec, for example whether a split programme is one or two timer events. The only irritation with the Panasonic is that a series record event is never cleared from the timer memory (obviously there is no trigger for the last event in the series) and te timer event list is constrained at 64 (I think) events. The TVOnics timer list seemed effectively limitless.

ITV (and ITV 3&4 in particular) play all kinds of tricks to reduce their data payload, which causes all kinds of other problems, in particular channel zap time. I won't go on and explain why (tedious!) unless someone begs me.
Brucey
Posts: 44517
Joined: 4 Jan 2012, 6:25pm

Re: ITV4 is driving me mental with bad 'PDC' and 'Series' tagging

Post by Brucey »

I suspect (without any sound basis in fact...) that you are right about the way specifications are interpreted; I've tried lots of different machines and they all behave slightly differently.

Weirdly the Sony (Pioneer) PVR(s) that I use seem to behave themselves nicely on ITV3 but not ITV4.

One persistent fault with most of these machines is that if there are consecutive programmes in a 'series' (eg as an omnibus broadcast) then the thing tends to go to sleep and then wake up between each episode, which means you will probably miss the start of the every consecutive episode. However if the timer is set separately for each broadcast (rather than as a 'series'), even with so-called PDC control, then it is more likely this won't happen.

cheers
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Brucey~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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