Hopper has reached max timers after only 33

[CRFTony]

Thanks so much for the update, Zach. I'm glad to hear this is an issue which will be fixed.

 

[BearHuntr]

I came across a couple of things that are interesting and may help some people:

First, it appears that the Hopper is storing 48 hours prior to the current day in the Scheduled Events. From what I remember, the 922 only stored 24 hours prior. If this is counting towards our total events, it's essentially adding an extra day of past events.

Second, and more useful. We tried to create a new timer today and got the dreaded 'You have reached the event limit message' so I wanted to test out a theory. I disabled the PTAT option and then I was able to create the timer that failed just a few minutes back. Then, I re-enabled PTAT and the new timer is still set to go. Hopefully, other people may find that helpful.

 

[navychop]

Any chance Hopper integration will be included with this fix?

Sure there is! There's always a chance in my home! :dev.

 

[navychop]

Hopefully this gets solved.

I agree. This is so disappointing to me. I love PTAT, but the events limit makes it almost impossible to follow many cable shows. It doesn't make sense that the "old technology" 622 didn't have this issue but the Hopper does.

I don't think it's affecting all users equally. I suspect a hard to reproduce bug that taints the event totals.

 

[navychop]

Zach, Can you explain why there is a limit to begin with and how the limit numbers are derived? I'm a programmer wannabee and I think an easy fix would be to eliminate the limit. Let the drive space do the limiting.

Welcome to a world in which I once swam. There are always limits. Sometimes, the limits are so large they don't matter. But "larger data" can be more difficult to handle and slow performance. Quite a few people have made a nice living "merely" by designing more efficient databases. And the solutions vary upon hardware, word size, software used, and who knows what else.

I can imagine it might be due to ram limits for holding a table in memory of the timers. I agree that they should/could probably swap some of it to disk, but the code could be interesting. I'm speaking as a 30+ year IT vet.
but know nothing of how dish's code is constructed.

Odd number for stack size limits. I'd have to play with estimated numbers of bytes per record to see if I could make sense of it. But those days are gone for me. Linked lists on disc could open up the floodgates, but I'm sure only with a performance hit they may consider unacceptable. But those limits were set some time ago. With newer HDDs, faster CPUs and more RAM, surely the number can be increased, if only for XiP and follow ons.

Of course, it seems none of us know a damn thing about how they do it. But we do know, sooner or later, RAM is going to limit things.

But OH, how I love how these sorts of questions send me back to some "happy days."

 

[Fearless]

I can't record anything, including an instant record by pressing the red button while watching something. Are others experiencing this?

 

[oldengineer]

I can't record anything, including an instant record by pressing the red button while watching something. Are others experiencing this?

It took one of my Hoppers 21 hrs to completely download the guide. During that time recording and search were sporadic and PTAT didn't work.

As for the timer limit I have 23 current series timers. Just for drill I added a bunch of 30 min show times just to see how many I could add. I gave up after adding 16 making a total of 39.

 

[glowrdr]

I've run into this issue now, never seen it before (722k and 922). I've got the Hopper, and hit the event limit with 41 timers. Hopefully there is a way that they can limit the polling for future events? I know exactly what my problem is - between the wife and I, most of our shows get repeated every day, sometimes 4-5 times a day. I record the show once, and it has to skip it for the next 2 weeks until the station moves on.

I.E. I record Cops. I bet there are 50+ events that are being skipped. My wife also watched all that Housewives crap. They play last weeks episode, then the current one. Then they do it again a couple hours later. This happens I believe everyday of the week. Bravo seems to be notorious for repeats - great if you miss an episode, bad if you've got Dish I guess.

Not a complete deal breaker - but definately an annoyance, and I'm sure there is an easy fix for it. As someone mentioned above - why store 2 days of past events? Heck - save the past hours events. I don't really care what happened prior to that.

 

[patmurphey]

glowrdr,

Weekly or 5 day timers will probably help with that issue.

 

[manteca]

--- i think that the number of timers need to be unlimited, even windows media center allow you to create an unlimited number of timers - right now i got 149 timers on windows media center for OTA programming based on series ---

 

[glowrdr]

glowrdr,

Weekly or 5 day timers will probably help with that issue.

A couple of people have mentioned this fix. I guess I'm wondering what the logic behind changing the timers is? Are you suggesting that I just create a timer, for say Thursday to record housewives, and have it ignore the rest of the week? Or do the weekly timers behave differently (perhaps only setting a week in advance rather then the 10 days or whatever the norm is).

Not saying it won't work - just trying to understand what this is actually doing for me in the background. So far we are OK. I did have to delete a timer to record some other richie rich show for the wife (bunch of oil tycoon kids?) but the timer I deleted was for a show that I've never actually seen yet, so I won't really miss it I guess.

 

[fangoria]

So I did something a little different today. I changed all existing timers to weekly or one time events. This way it reduces the number of searches or reduction of memory. This actually allowed me to add more timers. The timers that I added were also set to weekly or one time events. Basically I was using the single use timers as placeholders. Then when I finally set all the timers that I wanted, I went back and changed all the timers to whatever or however often I needed. This was a long and arduous process, but I hope it will work until they come out with a fix for it. So far I am up to 61 timers.

 

[dtrose]

Has DISH Acknowledged that this is a problem for which they are actively working on a solution?

 

[fangoria]

Yeah it was mentioned by Zach.

I just wanted to let everyone know that this is an issue we are aware about and the fix is being worked on right now. We are being told that this should be released in the next couple of weeks. Of course, as it is with all software fixes, this could be delayed but there is no reason for us to believe it will.

 

[js042507]

Not sure if this has been mentioned before, but I may have found an excellent work-around for the time being! Well, I too have pretty pi**ed about this new timer limit. I maxed out at 48, and couldn't re-add anymore after deleting some others. Anyways, I was searching for a couple shows a few days ago, and noticed a new option at the top-taskbar. It's called "seek & record". Basically, it let me add MANY more timers! Though, the only way a timer can be created is by selecting "only new"; or "new and reruns". No option for "once", "weekly", "daily", etc... which sucks because you can't create a new timer just for one occurrence. Though, you can always go back and restore previous events!

So, just do a search | select the desired show | at the top, click "seek and record" | = new timer!!

I have created more timers, without deleting any others, and now have 56! You will see the new timers listed with the "seek" option; under DVR --> Timers. (rather than "DVR")

Hope that helps!!

And who knows how many more can be created, but at least there's a little more room!

 

[kkimbrough]

I was really hoping the S107 software update would fix this, but it didn't. I tried the "Seek & Record" work around and it worked for adding one, but the next two I tried both seemed to search for a long time and then come back to the timer screen without creating anything. I might try a few more later on, but this is frustrating not being able to record, since I hate watching live TV.

 

[jcourcha]

New hopper, same problem after adding 44 timers after PTAT turned on.. but we had the default 20 max events set.. turned a few of these down to 5 and that seemed to help so probably hitting the event limit. We used to have the 96 timer limit on the 722k and that would be OK but would like to use the new 2TB hard drive for something.. couldn't turn off PTAT to test that workaround as it says it must finish today's recordings and then it will shut off. Seek and record just came back to the same screen without adding a timer

 

[jcourcha]

BTW this seems to have been fixed since we are now on S217 and have 90 timers

 

[Michael Wheeler]

BTW this seems to have been fixed since we are now on S217 and have 90 timers

I ran into this issue last night with around 40 timers I had 71 on my 722.. Just spoke with dish support on another issue and asked about this problem. They said that there is no set date for a fix and it has not been fixed yet.

Edit: 29 timers on the hopper.

 

[navychop]

As stated, don't forget there is also an Events limit.