Ridiculous U-Verse error messages

As we have discussed (many times) in the past, the message is issued when the client has pretty much any issue talking to the DVR.  Since networks are always 100% reliable and software never does anything unintended, it must be the dastardly user abusing the system by recording too much to cause the DVR not to respond to my request about the data stream for this channel.

We can look into your system profile to see if something is wrong.  

The STD service supports 4 live into home (3HD) and playback of 4 recordings at same time.  

• The 4 into, includes recording or watching live

@UVTVguru  the complaint is that, sometimes, this message appears when the limits that you provided have not been reached, i.e. there are no recordings being made, and there's only one person watching TV.

The apparent reason is that the set top only has one error message for "the DVR won't respond or gave an error to my request to fetch a block of this show" and that's it.  The message could be changed to add " or a network or DVR issue is preventing it from working" to be more accurate, but I'm not sure it makes that much difference in the grand scheme of things.

I got this a lot more often when I had a receiver on coax vs on Ethernet, which told me that (for me) it was primarily caused by network issues. 

Jeffer gets it.

There is simply NO reason why rewind shouldn't be available. If I can watch live TV, I should obviously be able to rewind it.

Here's the other error message which also causes me to facepalm. I'm sure a lot of users have been confused by this.

Again, I've received this when I'm not scheduled to record anything. I might get it at 10:42pm with the next recording scheduled for 11:30pm.

If I hit "ok" then the message goes away and I cannot rewind. It's the same effect to my TV as if I'm 15 minutes behind live TV, change the channel, then change back.

It simply does not make sense.

I can 99.9% guarantee that no other provider has these issues.

And yeah, they did seem to go down a lot when I switched away from coax. Both of those were on my wireless receiver. My DVR is directly connected to my gateway via cat-5 or whatever the heck it is.

The real issue, IIRC, is that the gateway/DVR connection gets "confused" and then the DVR doesn't know what to do. It then loses the buffer and displays an error message which someone worded very horribly.

Just imagine some guy who may not be the best with modern technology, assumes "oh, the error message is because someone recorded too much stuff" and then goes nuclear with the delete button and takes it from 10% empty to 35% empty by deleting random shows.

Oh look. That's not the cause of the error, but at least 25 random shows were deleted for no reason at all, some of which may not have been seen.

10:03pm. I changed channels on the wireless receiver. Within about two seconds, I hit the rewind button.

"The rewind function is not available."

I hit it again and got the message about "too many TVs watching or recording.

I am the only person watching TV. The next show scheduled to record is at 11pm.

10:03pm. I changed channels on the wireless receiver. Within about two seconds, I hit the rewind button.

"The rewind function is not available."

This is understandable.  At this point the multicast stream has been requested, but the DVR has not yet started receiving it and/or has not yet buffered enough to do any sort of rewinding.

"too many TVs watching or recording.

This is DVR responding with nasty error because nasty users are too demanding.

@JefferMC , you are correct that there shouldn't be an issue when there are only 2-3 coming in and no recordings.  It wouldn't be the in home Ntwk, we can check your profile as well to see if there is an issue, there have been reports. 

@baseballisback

The pause buffer counts as one of the live streams and does need time to capture.  It's only available from the time you tuned into the channels.  We are checking your account to be sure the profile is correct.  

I have rec'd data back from my expert and makes sense as you are both are long-timers.  

there are a lot of recordings on that DVR. It's a VIP2250 which is one of the original models and smaller HD capacity. 

1 of 3 things probably need to happen

1. Try to delete a bunch of the old recordings, if that doesn't help: 
2. DR that DVR
3. it's old, used a lot and probably needs to be DRd to fix HDD issues
   had DVR since 2017
4. replace with VIP2262v2

Options 2 & 3 will cause you to lose all old recordings.  

Options 2 & 3 will cause you to lose all old recordings.  

As will 4. ;-)

I rarely use the U-verse TV receivers other than to watch recorded TV.  We record everything and do most of the watching directly from the DVR so none of these network issues.  So, I do not see this message much any more, but I am not often doing things where there's an opportunity for them, so my new (to me) VIP2262v2 has no chance to give me these errors.

I've been using off-air and TVE to a Channels DVR installation for more flexibility, including the ability to record all games for a specific team without me having to search out each game and record it manually (although for games I really want to watch, I'll record it both ways, just in case there's an issue). 

Something that is really frustrating:  Say that I know that a team has a game at a certain time on a certain channel on Saturday.  Sometimes, as late as Friday night, the description of that time slot doesn't include the team, but I know it's the right program.  So I'll set a recording for the generic program at the right channel/time.  However, overnight, the schedule gets updated to set the teams.  Because the program is changed, my recording is removed.  So I have to check again the day of the game, find it and reset the recording.  If the guide doesn't get updated, my recording remains (which also happens, which is why I bother to set the recording the day before).

I don't know if DIRECTV Satellite/Internet/Stream is any better about this.

So...if I understand correctly, these errors are partially because too many old recordings are on the DVR and/or the DVR itself is old?

Would a non-destructive disaster recovery help? Is this still how?

Unplug the power cord of the DVR from the wall or from the back of the box and wait ten seconds. Plug the DVR back in.

When three white dots appear on the screen, unplug the DVR again. Repeat this process two more times.

Plug the DVR back in on the third time and leave in. Three white dots appear followed by a gear with a status bar at the bottom of the screen.

If the Disaster Recovery screen does not appear, repeat the steps above. If the Disaster Recovery screen appears, wait until completion.

There are two types of Disaster Recovery.  Non-destructive and Destructive.  You're asking about Non-Destructive and the 3 unplug cycles is correct.  I think to get Destructive, you do it another (a fourth) time, but my memory may be wrong on that.

I think that reindexes everything, but probably doesn't defrag, so it may not help.