Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 January 22

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January 22

Timer limit on Digital video recorders

I recently bought a new Digital video recorder and was somewhat disappointed to find that I can only set the timer to a maximum of one month ahead, even the daily/weekly repeat function auto-cancels after a month. Now if say I go on a three month holiday I can only record my favourite weekly show for the first month and then will miss the rest. With my old VHS I could set the timer for up to a year ahead and the repeat function would operate indefinitely even for years as long as you kept tapes up to it. Is this limit typical for Digital video recorders or just the Panasonic one I bought and if typical why have the manufacturers done it? Is it just pressure from the studios to limit recording functionality or what? Are there any 'cracks' that allows me to use my DVR timer more like my old VHS? Dob in a Nerd (talk) 04:27, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

You forgot to mention which one you have. Ask a friend or neighbour to configure it for you when you are on a vacation that lasts longer than a month, the same person that waters your plants and collects your mail. Download your favorite TV-shows, or buy them on DVD. Von Restorff (talk) 04:32, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

That's odd. I never had a problem with my TiVo auto-recording a program for months or years repeatedly. Which DVR do you have? Knowing that would help folks give you better answers. RudolfRed (talk) 04:43, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

As I said it's a Panasonic it's combined DVR/DVD recorder I think it's probably the DMR-XW385GLK but I'm not at home at the moment so can't double check. The shows I want to record are more things like live sports so I can't buy them on DVD or really even download later and I don't think my 80 year old neighbour will really be up to reprogramming my DVR for me. Dob in a Nerd (talk) 06:32, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

This would be the one [1] thanks. Dob in a Nerd (talk) 06:38, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

If you live in a deserted place with just 1 neighbour, two zombie sportsteams, and an evil ghost who broadcasts local television and your friends and family are unable to receive the same television signal and unable to visit you because they live in the nearest town (which is on another continent thousands of miles away) then the easiest solution would probably be to make a big signal fire and when they come to rescue you ask them if they would be so kind to write down your GPS coordinates, go back to the civilized part of the world, go to a museum to get a VCR and some videotapes and put them in a big crate and attach a parachute to that and then throw it out of a plane that is flying over your location. I am not sure if that would be really useful considering the fact that it is impossible to record many hours of video on a videotape, but maybe you just want to record one or two games during your holiday that lasts multiple months. For me personally it is kind of hard to get excited over a sportingsevent that happened months ago, but I am kinda weird. I am assuming you do not have an internetconnection at home, if you do you could build a robot so that it would be possible to program your DVR remotely over the internet. I am also assuming your holiday-destination does not have an internet connection otherwise you could've watched the game with live streaming, or download it via torrent or usenet. I am also assuming your friends and family are unable to receive the same television broadcasts and/or do not own and cannot afford a VCR or DVR and contacting the ghost is not an option because he is evil and the zombies want to eat your brain. Von Restorff (talk) 07:16, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your helpful reply and yes I am being sarcastic. I do live in a remote outback location and my family do live many hundreds of kilometres away and the stuff I want to record is on satellite pay-tv that few other people I know get and for your information I am travelling internationally to attend the sporting event which is why I also want to record it and the lead up events, which I will probably miss as I do things other than watch TV or streaming internet while travelling but I may wish to view the broadcasts later if I so choose, so your answer shows a hell of a lot of ignorance. And also for your information none of that matters or is any of your business as it is not relevant to the actual question that I asked which you obviously know nothing about and are unable to help with. So if you'd like to shut up maybe I can get an answer from someone with a mental age greater than ten who has something intelligent to say. Dob in a Nerd (talk) 08:04, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your kind reply; I love you too. Do you know Eric Hoffer's famous quote about rudeness? As you may have noticed there was quite a bit of useful advice hidden in my response. Contacting the evil ghost sattelite pay-tv channel may be a good option, or buying a VCR or a DVR with the required functionality. Maybe it is cheaper to pay the sattelite TV channel access fee for one of your friends in the area. You could even try recording the TV-signal on your computer (I think this is the best long-term solution in your case)! Much love, Von Restorff 08:32, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Let me just reset this question please as Mr Restorff has taken great joy in leading this post astray with childish behaviour. I originally asked some specific things none of which have been addressed except for briefly by RudolfRed, namely: Is this limit typical for Digital video recorders or just the Panasonic one I bought and if typical why have the manufacturers done it? Is it just pressure from the studios to limit recording functionality or what? Are there any 'cracks' that allows me to use my DVR timer more like my old VHS? If any knowledgeable Wikipedia members can provide any information on those I would be happy to hear it. Dob in a Nerd (talk) 12:25, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

A good DVR will have a guide meaning it can record based on programme not time. Nil Einne (talk) 12:53, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

That's a good point and is accurate except for the problem being that the satellite signal has to go through the pay-tv decoder and the only way to input this signal from the decoder to the DVR is via an A/V input. Since it's simply inputting to the DVR as a straight A/V signal there is therefore no electronic program guide associated with it and I have to manually set the timer which gets back to the original problem being that manually setting the timer is restricted to only a month ahead. Dob in a Nerd (talk) 14:10, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

That doesn't necessarily matter. Many DVRs get their guides from the internet either from free sources or from some subscription source. The DVR can be controlled with an IR blaster to change channel. This is definitely possible with a PC based DVR or a HTPC like MediaPortal, MythTV or even the crappy (IMO) Windows Media Centre. Guides for pay TV are generally less common but often there's still some options. (It's not that hard to set up here in NZ if you know what you're doing, I know since I've done it.)

You didn't mention where you live, but if it's Australia it sounds like OzTiVo supply guide data for FoxTel. No idea about other pay TV providers. (As you may known the official TiVo in Australia has no IR blaster nor any support from recording from a YPbPr, S-video or composite.) Shepherd Guide [2] also supports FoxTel although no other pay TV providers. To be fair these community or random person guides can be a bit fiddly, particularly when your source of guide data dies for whatever reason [3] but IMO it's worth the effort rather then trying to cope with timer only recording. Scraping may also be possible although with the precendent from the IceTV case, I'm not sure if FoxTel will bother to target EPG providers, in which case scraping is likely to be more fiddly.

If you want to avoid the internet because it's unreliable where you live or whatever, it sounds like EPGCollector support the OpenTV that FoxTel uses, although in that case you will to set up a satellite receiver on the PC DVR to collect the EPG. (You could also use it for FTA satellite channels.) This in itself shouldn't add much cost, a cheap Chinese USB satellite tuner from eBay or whatever is under US$25 IIRC but I'm not sure whether you'll have problems due to the split satellite stream and conflicts with the STB. (Presuming your LNB doesn't have multiple independent outputs.)

Also while this doesn't help much, I believe in Australia, as in most countries without legal requirements, there's little support for any sort of hardware Conditional-access module from most pay TV providers so you have no choice but to use the pay TV manufacturers DVR unless you want to run the risk of soft CAMs which even if they support your provider, can break for a long time when the provider finds a way to stop them. As for example happened with FoxTel in Australia. (I first read of this several months ago and a quick check shows it's still broken. Oh and of course the legality of soft CAMs is also not tested hence why I'm not providing a link for this last point although I personally have my doubts they can go after you if you aren't doing something dodgy like card sharing.) Anyway back to my main point, considering this, if you are in Australia, perhaps you may want to ask your government or MP whether they think it's a good thing the pay TV channels can shut out other DVR providers in this way, particularly given the advantages it gives them in areas like TV on demand. (Here in NZ, given that the government doesn't care that our pay TV provider looks like it it's going to become a monopoly which will slowly suck the lifeblood out of free TV, there's little point.)

BTW in terms of your earlier questions, I don't see any reason why TV companies would bother to try and restrict the timer in that way. They're much more likely to demand restrictions on skippind ads Freeview (Australia)#Digital video recorder restrictions and also on copying and accessing content. It seems much more likely it's something they implemented without much thinking because they didn't think it was going to be an issue.

It does seem a fairly common limited for the standalone combo DVR/DVD recorders, particularly Panasonic ones (a search for Panasonic DVR "month in advance" shows many model manuals mention this) but also others including very old DVD only recorders [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]. Just do a search for DVR (or DVD) "month in advance". Many of these have a similar limit number of events, 8 for very old ones, 16 for slightly more recent ones and 32 for current ones (although I did find some 12 [11] [12] and one 7 [13] and one 20 [14] and one 36 [15]).

Anyway the fact that it's been going on since 1999 makes me think either you're right and for some reason DVR/DVD recorder (and DVD recorder/VCR before them) manufacturers were forced by outside parties to limit their devices in such a way. Or I expect more likely, they're all using a related UI and probably the software under it and no one bothered to modify the timer functionality much except to increase the number of programmes supported. Perhaps the device doesn't actually store the date of the recording, but only how many days from now and updates it every day, and they limited that to 30. Another reason of course to like PC based PVRs, even if you don't use an IR blaster for pay TV like I didn't in 2003? when I first got one, you don't have to put up with such stupid limitations.

Nil Einne (talk) 17:42, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your thoughtful and detailed answer Nil Einne it certainly gives me a lot to consider, you seem to be very knowledgeable in this area and have brought up many options I did not know about such as the IR blasters and much else so perhaps it is your line of work. Unfortunately I am on the Austar service not Foxtel so my options are much more limited with EPGs and the like and to add to the problem my free to air service is via the Viewer Access Satellite Television system which also seems to be limited in a similar way with a CAM smartcard in the decoder and I have not yet worked out how to feed them both into my DVR at the same time as it only has one AV input. I think there might be some way to use the VAST system with a DVR and their standard EPG and perhaps with a connection other than the AV output/input but I have not looked into it in enough detail yet but at this stage I was mainly looking at the Austar problem without wanting to pay extra for their custom DVR solution. I suppose I haven't really worried all that much in the past because I actually only record one or two programs a week other than the occasional instant recordings you do when the phone rings or nature calls but that just needs access to a record button, but that all means I don't really want to spend too much effort or money on a variety of solutions. About the timer recordings it is strange because my old Panasonic VHS recorder can be set for up to a year ahead and the repeat function simply continues indefinitely so with all the links you provided above it seems they have intentionally removed functionality from the digital recorders timer function I don't know why. Well thank you again that is the sort of knowledgeable discussion I was hoping to get here not the rude reply I received earlier. Perhaps if I have any other questions I could ask you directly on your own talkpage rather than come here and be insulted? Thanks Dob in a Nerd (talk) 02:57, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

In reality you are the one who was rude and tried to insult me, not the other way around. You failed, I do not feel insulted, because I looked at your contributions. Do you know Eric Hoffer's famous quote about rudeness? Von Restorff (talk) 03:16, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

New monitor flickers only while gaming

I recently upgraded to a 1080p LCD monitor (I'd been using a 1280x1024 before). Since then, I've noticed a horizontal flicker where lines become brighter and dimmer. This seems to happen only while playing games or for short periods afterward, so at first I suspected it was a video card artifact, but it doesn't show up in screenshots. Could it be a power issue (e.g. the video card undervolting the output when the GPU and cooling are at full load)? I'm using a VGA cable, with an HDMI adapter at the card end. The refresh rate is 60 Hz (the old monitor was 75 Hz). The new monitor has no option to degauss it manually. NeonMerlin 07:37, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

LCD monitors don't have a degauss option. What you're seeing is the monitor upscaling, and possible deinterlacing of the signal from your games. Each game usually requires setting the screen resolution to match your monitor's. If a game has it's resolution set to "XXXi" (e.g. 720i), it means it sends an interlaced signal, which causes the line-flicker you describe. If your videocard can hack it, set your game(s) to output 1080p. — Edokter (talk) — 12:00, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

I don't think this is a native resolution problem. My aged video card also will cause individual lines to flicker at certain resolutions. The effect is intermittent, which certainly says "hardware problem, get another video card" to me, in my case at least. When my system boots, even the text on the POST screen has problems where garbagey text characters are in place instead of many of the normal characters. Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:04, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Since the OP only started seeing the problem since the new monitor, I think we can rule out a videocard defect. Simple enough to test by reconnecting the old monitor. — Edokter (talk) — 11:45, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Try enabling V-sync. I think what you're experiencing is Screen tearing. -- Obsidi♠n Soul 02:40, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

I've had that problem on my Dell. Amazingly, playing with the contrast setting fixed the problem! Sandman30s (talk) 12:06, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

In World of Warcraft, I fixed it by changing the mode from Windowed (Fullscreen) to Fullscreen. (In Windowed (Fullscreen), it was sometimes rendering 61 fps even though vsync was on.) What are these modes usually called in non-Blizzard games? NeonMerlin 04:04, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

How to speed up the floppy drive in VICE?

I've now got OpenCBM working with ZoomFloppy, and have been successfully able to transfer my old Commodore 64 disks to my Linux PC as D64 files. But when I load these D64 files into VICE, it looks like it is faithfully emulating the notoriously slow Commodore 1541 drive, and I have to wait twenty or thirty minutes to load a game consisting of less than 100 kilobytes. Modern PCs should be able to do this under a second. Is there a way to speed up the emulated floppy drive in VICE while still keeping the speed of the emulation otherwise faithful? JIP | Talk 11:02, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Try this, use warp. Von Restorff (talk) 12:02, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

I don't think that's what I want. I only want to speed up the floppy disk emulation, while keeping the actual emulated Commodore 64 at the speed of a real Commodore 64. JIP | Talk 12:31, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Whatever happens with your speed, congratulations on transferring 30 year old floppy disks! I am surprised the magnetic coating was intact. That is delightful! Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:02, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Well, not all of them quite made it. The most were intact, but I think one-tenth to one-fifth had minor read errors, and a couple refused to work all together. I haven't had the time to test all the games, but some of the resulting D64 files crash VICE when opened, so I guess they didn't manage to transfer successfully. I don't have a real Commodore 64 any more, so I can't try to see whether the disks still work when accessed from a real Commodore 64. JIP | Talk 19:06, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Well, in that case, sorry to hear it. I sympathize; I remember copying floppies with two of those things hooked up together, and I do think it was an hour to copy each disk. Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:08, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I remember that it took almost an hour to copy a disk with a real Commodore 64. With the ZoomFloppy, it only took about five minutes. (Which is still a long time, when you're accustomed to disk transfers taking a couple of seconds.) I've tested a few games so far. Bounty Bob Strikes Back and Wizball work OK. Spelunker starts OK, but I've so far been unable to actually play it. Crystals of Zong crashed as soon as it started. I haven't had the time to test any more. JIP | Talk 19:13, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Did you try the -truedrive command line option? Von Restorff (talk) 20:33, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

I'm sure you know this already - but why go through the pain of transferring disks when these images are available for download and not illegal to use since you have the originals? Also, there are many other great emulators for C64, at least for PC anyway, which load images immediately. Now that was a brilliant era - I miss those good old days. Sandman30s (talk) 12:04, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Subtraction?

On my AppleMac 'Numbers' programme I have a spread sheet where I am taking from 'A' (the larger sum), a smaller sum 'B'. The resultant balance 'C' is preceded by a minus (-) sign, why should this be please? It is confusing because 'C is a quantity value, the result of taking 'B' from 'A', it is an actual value, not of itself minus anything. Any advice will be welcome please! --85.211.142.228 (talk) 11:56, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

If your taking a larger number from a smaller number that will leave you with a Negative number which is what the minus sign means in your program. Dob in a Nerd (talk) 12:16, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Please reread the question Dob in a Nerd. Von Restorff (talk) 12:29, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Your terminology is somewhat confusing. Could you give us more concrete information (the numbers and the equation involved)? Paul (Stansifer) 12:33, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Paul, herewith the numbers 12,684.86 from which is deducted 18489.12 and I am getting the result "-5804.26" (and I am further dividing this by 12 and getting "-483.69").--85.211.142.228 (talk) 12:48, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Well, that is all correct. 12,684.86 is smaller than 18489.12, so the difference is a negative number. You may be confused because one of the numbers is written with a comma? For a simpler example, consider 13-18, which gives -5. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:04, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Well, no wonder that this ageing, uneducated man is confused, thanks for the answers though.--85.211.142.228 (talk) 13:30, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

You're welcome. I suspected that's what you must have been doing despite how you originally wrote the question so glad we could help. Dob in a Nerd (talk) 13:59, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

iPad bookmarks

Resolved

Can anyone tell me how to 'bookmark' web pages on my iPad2 please? Thanks in anticipation.--85.211.142.228 (talk) 20:34, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

here Von Restorff (talk) 20:44, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Brilliant, just what I needed, thanks--85.211.142.228 (talk) 20:58, 22 January 2012 (UTC)