DISH DVR WITH OFF THE AIR PROGRAM GUIDE

[seanmc1114]

Does anyone know if DISH has an HD DVR that will download and display the program guides for off the air channels coming through an antenna? I now have the VIP622 and it shows the OTA channels in the program guide but not the program information for individual programs. I can record in real time but I have to start each recording manually and stop it manually. Before I switched to the HD DVR, my previous DISH receiver, don't remember which model, did display the programming info for my local channels in the Macon, Georgia market coming off of the antenna. I also have friends on DIRECTV whose HD recorder displays the program guide for local OTA channels. If I want to keep my DISH HD service am I just stuck or do I have any other options? It seems that if DISH has a non-HD DVR that does what I want, they would probably have an HD DVR that does the same, but everybody at customer support I talk to either doesn't understand what I am talking about or says DISH doesn't have such a receiver.

[ktmron]

the same thing happenend to me with my vip722 ( no ota guide) until i poneyed up the five bucks for the local stations. then magically the guide appeared. a bit redundent yes but much more convenient. it seems to me we should'nt have to go that route.......cheers.....ron.

[seanmc1114]

I thought of the same thing but unfortunately I live in the Columbus, Georgia DMA whose local channels are not offered by DISH. So I don't have the option of subscribing to the guide. I actually pick up the Macon, Georgia channels better than the Columbus stations so I usually watch them and like I said before, on my old receiver I got the programming guide for the Macon channels even though I didn't qualify for the channels themselves.

[allargon]

You answered your own question. Perhaps you need to "move" to Macon. (This let's Dish give you access to Macon locals.)

[seanmc1114]

I get what you are saying and I know that would solve my problem of getting locals through the satellite service. What I don't understand is how my previous receiver was able to download and display the program guide for local channels I was not authorized to receive and was not paying for. The guide did not disappear until I upgraded to the VIP622 when I first subscribed to DISH's HD programming. When I called customer service to ask about this, after some runaround, they finally told me that the 622 is not capable of doing what I am talking about. I guess my question is whether that is true of that particular model or they are just giving me BS?

[aaronstout]

I had the Dish 921 HD DVR and during it's history of updates which get downloaded inline with programming, usually very late at night, I've seen the program guide for Local OTA channels come and go.

After seeing it being there, and then having it go away, I called their support line and explained the situation and was told that the hardward didn't support it (reading the transmitted PSIP information in the ATSC signal) and that the receiver could not possibly display it for the local stations... unless of course you subscribed to the locals with their service as well.

I didn't see the purpose of paying for the service from them, only to have the signal compressed more than it was otherwise, so I had never opted to have it enabled. They gave me the Dish version of my locals for "free" for some time while they worked through one bug that made the OTAs go away altogether, but eventually it returned to pay status and I dropped it after some months.

Then quite some time later it started working again! It worked for a week or so and then suddenly went away again. The next time it started working again, I tried to go into the menu system to disable automatic updates (previously a choice), but this was no longer available as an option.

Later I've seen it start working again for a short time, and then go away again.

I have no real insight into how the Dish HD DVR tuners work, but I think it is probably a requirement that all ATSC tuners be able to read the PSIP information being transmitted. The local stations being sent from the satellite are likely not carrying PSIP any longer, as they would use some other signaling protocol between the set top box and the Dish network. The fact that I've seen it work at times, sometimes for weeks, tells me that it is very possible for the set to display the OTA PSIP information regarding channel guide information. I think the telling part of it is that I think (not certain, as this was years ago) the guide information for the channels that were NOT carried by Dish, also showed up!

Perhaps they didn't want to bother with keeping the local OTA PSIP information on the HD DVRs (where it is most handy to have) working. It could be intentional to convince you to buy the locals from them, but just as likely to be lack of incentive to spend support efforts/dollars on something that isn't originating from them. I believe as we have gone through the early stages of ATSC conversions there have been some growing pains with the guide information formats. There is a lot that is carried by this PSIP, inband signaling besides the program guide. As the features have been turned on and off by local stations, they sometimes don't get it quite right and it causes problems. Multiply that by hundreds of stations and you get a pretty good support nightmare, if you choose to support that effort. Sadly I've also seen that while I had a chief engineer at a large local station assure me direclty in email that just as much attention was paid to monitoring the digital signal as analog, personal experience would suggest that was not actually the case. Have any of you heard the "testing.... left front... front center..... center.... right surround.... left surround...." break right into the program audio you were watching?

Please don't take this as an attack on any local stations. There has been a LOT of technical change with this transistion to digital transmission, so things are naturally going to occur. One example was that in my local market, persons with one particular rear projection HDTV model that tuned one of the local stations would have their sets immediately go off, and they would not be able to bring it back on. It would "crash" the internal CPU, reboot, come back online, only to immediately crash again. This cycle would continue. To resolve it, I had to remove the antenna input from the set, reset the system and then have it come back up again. I removed the offending local station for weeks, until they corrected the problem. I point this out only to illustrate how odd this sort of stuff can be. Each manufacturer has to interpret standards and make design/firmware choices on what they believe the standards mean. While testing is done, there is no way to test all combinations a consumer will put together, nor how a creative implementation at some point years later, could cause a software issue. The problem that I encountered was specific to only one model series from one brand (in this case Mits), so trying to provide support for all the glitches that could occur, would be expensive and probably doomed to failure to begin with.

I will say however that many times I find myself wanting to record one OTA programming while watching another, or otherwise record two OTA channels at the same time, and this in not possible with any of their sets, unless you DO also subscribe to the locals through them. This IS a restriction of the hardware, as there is only a single ATSC tuner in any of their sets, to my knowledge. So, there is a reason to purchase their OTA channels, which solves the program guide, at least on their subset of OTA channels they they carry.

Maybe if it is really only a support issue, things will stabilize after analog transmission finally is dropped, and we will see it again. The fact that it seems to work for the non-DVR HD receivers, would suggest that it is probably more a marketing decision to generate more subscriptions to satellite based local channel transmission though. There are some more issues with a DVR though, as it has to schedule trigger events for recording, ending recordings, searching for future programming events to record, so I think again, it is much more of an issue for DVRs than regular receivers/tuners.

[jerfilm]

I think the key is that you have to subscribe to SOME local service. Here's the twist - we have a summer home in Colorado and subscribe to DISH with Denver locals. (Couldn't get 'em in the mountains if we wanted to OTA). Back home, a thousand miles away, we set up our home setup as a "second receiver" and so get the Denver locals there as well (unlike D*TV who only beams things into the local area). We have an OTA and it perfectly displays all of the programming and descriptions for the OTA channels which are literally, all around us, as well. Except for one - a network station in a market of 43,000 where they don't offer "locals" yet - that one just sez "Digital Service"

Oh yes, it's a 622

[seanmc1114]

Unfortunately, I have the problem of living in a market whose locals are not offered by DISH so the only locals I can subscribe to are the distant network feeds of NBC, CBS and Fox offered by All American Direct. Our local ABC affiliate in Columbus, Georgia has a policy of never granting waivers for anyone. I actually spoke to the general manager of the ABC station about this one time when he spoke to our civic club about the digital transition and he told me that the week before Jimmy Carter, whose home in Plains, GA is in our DMA, had called him and asked for a waiver and that he had turned down the former president's request. If true, at least he is consistent.

My main question is whether, if and when DISH gets around to offering my local networks and I pay the extra $5.00 or so a month to subscribe to them and have them beamed into my receiver from the satellite, will their program guide also show up for the same channels which I am getting OTA from my rooftop antenna which I have run into my receiver as well? As I said in my first post, that is what happened with my previous non-HD receiver even though I was not getting any locals from DISH. I did get all of distant networks except ABC from DISH before they were required to take them away as a result of the lawsuit they lost. It was only after I upgraded to the VIP622 that I lost the program guide for my OTA locals. Last week they had to replace that with a VIP722 but still no program guide.

[Larry Kenney]

The Dish Network receivers do not display the program information received from the stations. It uses a program service provided by Tribune Media Services, both for the OTA stations and satellite feeds. However, you must subscribe to the Local Station service ($5 a month) to receive the information for the OTA stations.

You'll get programming information for all of the stations you pick up over the air. I'm in the San Francisco DMA, but receive some of the Sacramento stations over the air. Those stations are displayed in the program guide with full program information just like the ones from San Francisco, San Jose and the surrounding area covered by the SF DMA.

Larry
SF