Is series link working for anyone?

dancin

Series link is not working on my new UPC dvr. I've been onto UPC and an engineer is callng next week. However as it's a new device, it's probably a good bet the engineer willthot have seen this problem too many times before. So I'm wonderng how widespread this problem is ( or isn't ).

What's happening for me is that I select a show to record (say Top Gear on BBC2 at 8pm on Sunday), the DVR offers the choice of recording just this show or the entire series. I select the entire series, and Top Gear appears in the TV Planner as a show to be recorded next Sunday at 8pn on BBC2.

Sunday comes and Top Gear records. When the show has finished recording I go to my TV Planner and I expect to see Top Gear as a show to be recorded the following sunday at 8pm. However, the only show information is has is 'Not Yet Available'.
If I go into the TV guide I can see that the following Sunday at 8pm on BBC2, Top Gear is listed along with show information.

So the series link is unable to determine when the next show is going to happen, even though the show is in the TV guide.

When I first noticed this, I though that the DVR would realise the show was coming along sooner to broadcast time, so I left the planner alone. However, the show information does not change from 'Not Yet Available', and when the show is actually being broadcast the DVR does not record it automatically.

With a Series Linking facility, I expect it to record all the show's in the series, and not just the one I initially start with and then give up.

I find it hard to believe that UPC would roll out a Series Link service which simply does not do that, so I'm hoping that it is a DVR specific problem and not just a completely dodgy series link service.

So I'm wondering is there anyone out there for whom Series Link is working OK, and picking up next weeks show when this weeks one is finished recording?

Alun

Mine works just fine for a whole bunch of programs.

JayDubiya

Hey dancin, I'm getting the NTL digital+ installed next week and have noticed a few people with problems similar to you with series link. NTL's reply always seems to be that they've never heard of the problem. Could you post up what the engineer says when he comes out? He might have some bit of a better idea than the drones that work in customer service!!

J_Dublin15

dancin wrote: »

What's happening for me is that I select a show to record (say Top Gear on BBC2 at 8pm on Sunday), the DVR offers the choice of recording just this show or the entire series. I select the entire series, and Top Gear appears in the TV Planner as a show to be recorded next Sunday at 8pn on BBC2.

Sunday comes and Top Gear records. When the show has finished recording I go to my TV Planner and I expect to see Top Gear as a show to be recorded the following sunday at 8pm. However, the only show information is has is 'Not Yet Available'.

Is it saying not yet avaliable right at the bottom of the screen? If so ignore that, long as it has the time and date listed in the main pane of the screen of the next show, which it will, it will work. The information doesn't always seem to fill out.

It works fine for me.

d8player

dancin wrote: »

Sunday comes and Top Gear records. When the show has finished recording I go to my TV Planner and I expect to see Top Gear as a show to be recorded the following sunday at 8pm. However, the only show information is has is 'Not Yet Available'.

I have seen this "not yet available" but it ends up recording regardless.

dancin

Will defo report back on what the engIneer has to say.

Not yet available appears within the list of upcoming recordings, and is beside each show it is having trouble with. I've tried leaving a few shows in this state up to recording time and it just does not record the show.

Given that this is not a problem for everyone, it looks very much to me like it being a problem wth the dvr box.

Mimikyu

This post has been deleted.

dancin

An engineer called today, took one lOok at the problem, and said "yep, that happens on my box too, there is a problem wth the series link software. It's a knows problem"

he did a hard reset, and essentially said to wait and see what happens when the next software upgrade happens.

I can't believe that they are selling a servce which does not work as advertised.

I'll mail them on Monday to get a mail thread going with support, but not holding out much hope of a fix soon.

h2s

Series Link never worked properly for me and while the helpdesk were helpful and did try to sort it out, they couldn't.

For that reason, when my 12 month are up, it's back to SKY.

dancin

Had an engineer out again and he replaced the box, turns out it was faulty as it kept rebooting. So reset my series links and went on holiday (lovely 10 days in the sun). Back today and the same problem, all of my series were showing 'not yet available', sigh. Only missed a few shows as thankfully most are on Sunday and Monday. Will mail UPC again tomorrow.
Surely this is working for someone? Maybe it's the software version? My dvr is on firmware 3.7.0.3

ryanoj

Yo mofo, Paddy here. I'm on my 3rd sky hd box!! same problem, scheduled recordings failed 60 percent of the time. I had to keep the drive 50% free to ensure planner worked. Needless to say, when we came back from the mobile half of Jennifer's soaps failed (hate that!!) She went mad, so I said we'll switch to UPC when our contract is up in October. Might be having second thoughts now. Although their al-round package is tempting price wise. Maybe their hd box will be better?? BTW how's all the gang?

Bill-e

I had the same problem with the UPC Digital+ box. I upgraded to the Digital+ HD box today so I hope they have dealt with this issue.
It's false advertising and I reckon would allow a user to opt out of the contract. Which I will do if it doesn't work on the new box.

d8player

Bill-e wrote: »

I had the same problem with the UPC Digital+ box. I upgraded to the Digital+ HD box today so I hope they have dealt with this issue.
It's false advertising and I reckon would allow a user to opt out of the contract. Which I will do if it doesn't work on the new box.

Its unlikely that Series Link functionality is called out in your contract and even if it was it you would need to prove conclusively that it is completely broken for you before you can void the contract. It sucks to the high heavens that its not reliable for some people but I'm not sure there's a lot you can do.

h2s

UPC series link is nothing short of rubbish. I don't thinks it's anything to do with the boxes themselves but rather how the service is setup on the UPC end and the information exchanged between UPC and the TV stations.

Within the last week I have discovered just how ****ty that whole system is: i setup up a series link on rte2 for criminal minds and when I went to watch the lastest episode discovered that it recorded NCIS instead even though the programme info said it had recorded Criminal minds. I was actually blaming RTE at the time as this happened once before with the same series a month ago.

Then, it happened again with Criminal Minds but this time on Living TV, once again the recorded information said it was criminal minds but it was actually Ghost Whisperer.
Information is getting screwed up somewhere and the wrong info getting fed to the set top box.

gerryo

Normally after selecting a program in the TV guide for future recording, you can navigate to "My TV Planner" & extend the recording time by highlighting the program & pressing the record button. The current end time appears & you can press "record" to extend the end time in increments of 5 mins.

However, if you are using "series link", while you can see & highlight the program in "My TV Planner", pressing the record button does not increment the recording end time (i.e., nothing happens).

You have no way to edit the end time & usually crop the ends off shows as the guide time & "air time" are usually out of sync. Really not worth doing "series link in this case.

Setting an extra 5 mins overrun time would help, except if you want to watch something else while you have 2 scheduled recordings overlapping.

If there was name embedded in the transmission stream to identify exactly what show was being aired, the box could read this & instead of using a timer, could stop recording when the name changed = no more missing endings.

Can't be that hard to do

JoeyJJ

Have to say works like a treat for me, usually rercord from C4 and BBC2 mostly though. D18 area if that makes a difference.

Jumpy

Alun wrote: »

Mine works just fine for a whole bunch of programs.

I know its weird, but does anyone else subconciously read that in a Captain Reynolds voice?

Paulw

Mine works. I've yet to have a problem with it (Digital+HD box).