# Odd recording issue - Roamio Plus, M-card or Tuning Adapter?



## thefisch (Jul 25, 2015)

After 3.5 years of mostly trouble free operation on our Roamio Plus, we've started experiencing a recording issue in the last week or so. We are with Spectrum (formerly Brighthouse) and still have the original BH M-card and Cisco STA1520 tuning adapters. We also have a Roamio Basic in another room for the kids with the same type of M-card and TA but there's been no drama with that one. About once a month, I power cycle the TA's for both as preventative maintenance. Until now, the Roamio Plus has operated just fine along with the Mini connected to it. The only prior issue with the Roamio Plus is that sometimes when I cycle through the 6 tuners, one or two tuners will display black and I have to press select to tune the channel again. This mostly happens with upper tier and premium channels. Not sure why that happens but it wasn't affecting any recordings so I ignored it. Although now it might have been an early sign of the current issue.

So now to the present issue - for some onepasses, scheduled recordings start but only the first minute or two is recorded. Mostly this has happened on ABC but it also happened on NBC and HBO once or twice. History manager does not show any event so it seems as far as TiVo is concerned the recording was successful. Other recordings worked fine so there didn't seem to be a consistent channel or show this happens with. First time we noticed this , I restarted the Roamio and TA but the issue happened again a few days later in between days of successful recordings. 

Last night, I was able to observe the beginning of a scheduled recording that failed and noticed some odd behavior. The recording started on schedule but a minute and 10 seconds in the recording stopped, a brief black screen and live TV played with the buffer. I had to go into the guide to start recording again (wouldn't work from live TV with record button) and then it only recorded the first minute again. I noticed then that when the recording would be interrupted that the tuning adapter would blink a few times and the screen with go black for a moment. I also noticed at least once a grey box popup on screen that said updating channels with a progress bar. While I did not note the channels, the other tuners were on other random channels (probably due to suggestions recording). 

I rebooted both the TiVo and TA and left the TA unconnected at first and the recording worked fine (it was on ABC). I connected the TA after 20 minutes and the recording continue with no issue. At this time, all the tuners were on the same channel (ABC) thanks to the reboot. About 30 minutes later, three other shows started to record on schedule and had no issue (one was AMC and another HBO and the third on PBS).

At first I suspected the TA since it started blinking when the recording stopped and then the grey box with updating channels message but perhaps that is normal behavior if the TiVo has a hiccup and stops communicating with it. I am not sure if the channel I was trying to record is the issue or perhaps a different channel tuned in on another tuner that triggered something. Hoping for some advice on how to troubleshoot since the issue is intermittent.

For what it's worth, after the first recording stopped, I set all four scheduled shows to record on the Roamio Basic with the same type of equipment and those all recorded without issue.


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## thefisch (Jul 25, 2015)

Well maybe the forum is good luck. In the week since posting the thread the issue has not happened again. Perhaps a restart was all that was needed. Time will tell...


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## tim1724 (Jul 3, 2007)

Sounds like typical TA weirdness to me.


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## CinciDVR (May 24, 2014)

I'm with tim1724 in that I think it's TA weirdness. How many shows did this happen on? Did every failure have 1-2 minutes of recording, or was there more variation? Did it always happen around the same time? Did it ever happen when more than one recording was in progress, and if so were all of the recordings truncated, or just one?


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## thefisch (Jul 25, 2015)

Thanks for the feedback. After each reboot, I check the TA values for tuner, FDC and RDC and they don't seem out of whack. Maybe the weirdness is just randon like that. Perhaps I need to reboot TA more frequently than monthly. If the problem resurfaces and starts to happen consistently, I may swap the TA in question with the other one I have with the Roamio Basic. Not sure I can do that without contacting the cable company. If the problem follows the TA then I guess I would swap it out.



CinciDVR said:


> How many shows did this happen on?


We probably missed about 6-8 shows during that one week. Meanwhile, there were several that still recorded fine.


CinciDVR said:


> Did every failure have 1-2 minutes of recording, or was there more variation?


Yes. There was no variation.


CinciDVR said:


> Did it always happen around the same time?


While most of what we record is between 7-9pm, I do think this happened with one late night show.


CinciDVR said:


> Did it ever happen when more than one recording was in progress, and if so were all of the recordings truncated, or just one?


When I observed the behavior the one evening I wrote about above, all the recordings stopped that were in progress. So it affected all tuners the same it appears.


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## tim1724 (Jul 3, 2007)

thefisch said:


> Perhaps I need to reboot TA more frequently than monthly.


With my STA1520 a monthly reboot doesn't do anything useful. It can fail at any time, even 30 minutes after booting, whereas other times it works perfectly four or five months without me needing to reboot it. There are a few different failure modes. The one I encounter most often is that it loses its connection to the SDV server at the head end; once that happens it just refuses to do anything (but for the most part it acts like it's working, so the TiVo doesn't usually notice that it's not working)


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## thefisch (Jul 25, 2015)

tim1724 said:


> With my STA1520 a monthly reboot doesn't do anything useful. It can fail at any time, even 30 minutes after booting, whereas other times it works perfectly four or five months without me needing to reboot it. There are a few different failure modes. The one I encounter most often is that it loses its connection to the SDV server at the head end; once that happens it just refuses to do anything (but for the most part it acts like it's working, so the TiVo doesn't usually notice that it's not working)


Do you just reboot to fix or wait it out? Since I got to observe the issue only once, I didn't think to count how many times the TA light blinked or checked the TA menu for values. If/when it happens again, I hope to gather more data points.


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## tim1724 (Jul 3, 2007)

thefisch said:


> Do you just reboot to fix or wait it out?


I reboot the TA. Nothing else fixes it. When it's in the "I can't find my server so I'm not going to do anything but I'll pretend I'm working and tell the TiVo that everything's fine" mode I don't think it blinks the LED to indicate a problem .. because it doesn't seem to think there is any problem.

There are other failure modes in which it will blink the LED. (For example, ever since the last TA update that Charter pushed out around 2 years ago my TA will refuse to boot if it's connected to the TiVo via USB. I have to disconnect the USB, power cycle the TA, wait until it's reached a point where it gets to what I call the "fast blink" stage, then reconnect the USB. Or alternatively I can reboot the TiVo and the TA at the same time, which will cause the TiVo's USB port to be inactive during the critical phase of the process. Either way it's a pain.)


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## thefisch (Jul 25, 2015)

Thanks for the info. I would mind the reboot less if you didn't have to disconnect the usb and then wait to reconnect it later. A simple power cycle of the TA would be so much easier.


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## CinciDVR (May 24, 2014)

tim1724 said:


> With my STA1520 a monthly reboot doesn't do anything useful.





thefisch said:


> Do you just reboot to fix or wait it out?


I have a Cisco STA1520 that is used with Spectrum (used to be TWC). Since configuring a regular reboot of the TA, I haven't had a single recording failure. Before that, I would probably have a failure every 3-4 months.



tim1724 said:


> I have to disconnect the USB, power cycle the TA, wait until it's reached a point where it gets to what I call the "fast blink" stage, then reconnect the USB. Or alternatively I can reboot the TiVo and the TA at the same time, which will cause the TiVo's USB port to be inactive during the critical phase of the process.


Before I setup an automated reboot, I was able to simply unplug the power to my TA at which point the Tivo would say it had lost communication with the TA. Then I would plug in the TA and after it rebooted the Tivo would say that it detected a TA. I never had to unplug the USB.

My automated reboot happens once a week at 4am Monday morning. I bought a $16 timer off of Amazon that has two plugs that can be individually programmed. I plugged the Tivo into one, and the TA into the other. Then at 4am, the timer turns off both plugs. At 4:01 it turns back on the plug for the TA. At 4:06 it turns on the plug for the Tivo. I would have chosen a less frequent reboot, but this timer only supports daily or weekly, nothing longer. The timer I use is https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M31OP44?ref_=ams_ad_dp_ovrl.


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## tim1724 (Jul 3, 2007)

CinciDVR said:


> Then I would plug in the TA and after it rebooted the Tivo would say that it detected a TA. I never had to unplug the USB.


That worked for me until two or three years ago when Charter pushed out a firmware update.


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## CinciDVR (May 24, 2014)

tim1724 said:


> That worked for me until two or three years ago when Charter pushed out a firmware update.


I hate it when updates break things!


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## thefisch (Jul 25, 2015)

So I ended up swapped the offending TA for another one from Spectrum last week. After getting them to activate the new TA (well new to me, it was made in 2012), everything seemed fine at first. But after a few days, we had the recording issue again. It seems the TA has trouble tuning to certain channels that are in certain tiers of the Spectrum service. These may not be shows we are watching but random suggestions that TiVo records on various channels available to us. When that happens the TiVo and TA seem at odds and the tuners drop their feed and then try to tune in again. While this is happening, I am not able to cycle tuners to check them all. The TiVo won't let me change any channels or swap tuners at that time but I can watch recordings without issue. Restarting the TiVo so they are all tuned to one channel returns the TiVo to normal operation as I suppose it is no longer fighting with the TA.

At first I thought I could come up with a list of trouble channels by waiting for a recording issue to occur and then take note of the channels tuned across all the tuners, figuring one of them might be causing issues for the TA. But the bad channel seemed to be some random channel among the 300+ I have rather than the same one each time, so I am taking another approach to isolate the issue. First I turned off recording suggestions to remove the issue of random channels recording. Haven't really seen any decent suggestions record in a while anyway. Second, I unplugged the TA and then browsed through every channel in my guide on the TiVo to see which ones require the TA and then removed any of those that I really don't watch from my channel guide. I did't get rid of them all as we do watch certain channels like Starz and the NFL network sometimes. But I thought shrinking the pool of TA-required channels might help reduce or eliminate the issue.

It will take some time to see if this approach helped eliminate the issue or not. I will report back later on.


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## htjazz (Jul 21, 2010)

thefisch said:


> So I ended up swapped the offending TA for another one from Spectrum last week. After getting them to activate the new TA (well new to me, it was made in 2012), everything seemed fine at first. But after a few days, we had the recording issue again. It seems the TA has trouble tuning to certain channels that are in certain tiers of the Spectrum service. These may not be shows we are watching but random suggestions that TiVo records on various channels available to us. When that happens the TiVo and TA seem at odds and the tuners drop their feed and then try to tune in again. While this is happening, I am not able to cycle tuners to check them all. The TiVo won't let me change any channels or swap tuners at that time but I can watch recordings without issue. Restarting the TiVo so they are all tuned to one channel returns the TiVo to normal operation as I suppose it is no longer fighting with the TA.
> 
> At first I thought I could come up with a list of trouble channels by waiting for a recording issue to occur and then take note of the channels tuned across all the tuners, figuring one of them might be causing issues for the TA. But the bad channel seemed to be some random channel among the 300+ I have rather than the same one each time, so I am taking another approach to isolate the issue. First I turned off recording suggestions to remove the issue of random channels recording. Haven't really seen any decent suggestions record in a while anyway. Second, I unplugged the TA and then browsed through every channel in my guide on the TiVo to see which ones require the TA and then removed any of those that I really don't watch from my channel guide. I did't get rid of them all as we do watch certain channels like Starz and the NFL network sometimes. But I thought shrinking the pool of TA-required channels might help reduce or eliminate the issue.
> 
> It will take some time to see if this approach helped eliminate the issue or not. I will report back later on.


Hi--I've been having this EXACT issue for several months. TiVo Roamio Pro with Spectrum. Have swapped out EVERYTHING-- several TAs, cable cards, cables, and I had a failing drive and installed a new hard drive three weeks ago, but that wasn't the issue. I started taking notes on what frequency certain channels use. I noticed one channel when working perfectly fine was on one frequency. When the TA flipped out and started flashing, the channel no longer had a sharp digital picture. It was fuzzy like analog and the frequency had changed. It didn't change back until I rebooted everything. I removed that channel and now just use the HD version. I've wondered if the problem was with something happening on Spectrum's end, or now I'm wondering if I have a bad tuner. Did you ever come across a solution? I don't have the problem as long as I don't turn to some suspect channels, but that's not an option as I do watch some.


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## thefisch (Jul 25, 2015)

I never found a solution or fix other than to avoid the troublesome channels. Since I removed unnecessary channels from the guide and turned off suggestions, it hasn't been an issue. Occasionally I will flip through upper tier channels and still get some TA tuning issues.


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## htjazz (Jul 21, 2010)

thefisch said:


> I never found a solution or fix other than to avoid the troublesome channels. Since I removed unnecessary channels from the guide and turned off suggestions, it hasn't been an issue. Occasionally I will flip through upper tier channels and still get some TA tuning issues.


Thanks. I'm going to keep looking for a fix. I do know it wasn't a problem when the company was still Time Warner. But after Spectrum, software updates have caused issues. And they're not much help since they got rid of the CableCard division. I just went for a stretch of 11 days without having to reboot anything by staying away from some channels. I usually can go no more than 36 hours. So I think I'm close to narrowing it down. But I pay them too much money for it not to work, so I'm going to keep trying. I'll post again if it gets fixed.


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## kad7777 (Mar 21, 2008)

htjazz said:


> Thanks. I'm going to keep looking for a fix. I do know it wasn't a problem when the company was still Time Warner. But after Spectrum, software updates have caused issues. And they're not much help since they got rid of the CableCard division. I just went for a stretch of 11 days without having to reboot anything by staying away from some channels. I usually can go no more than 36 hours. So I think I'm close to narrowing it down. But I pay them too much money for it not to work, so I'm going to keep trying. I'll post again if it gets fixed.


Your problems sound eerily close to the problems I've had (check my posts, there aren't many).
When I thought it was my TA, it was actually my signal strength. Added an amplifier and problems went away.
When I had recording issues, I replaced my hard drive and the problems went away.
Again, check out my posts if you haven't already. They may help you.


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## htjazz (Jul 21, 2010)

Well, I wrote to the FCC 1/26. The site said describe your problem in 3-5 sentences. I wrote a lengthy essay. Spectrum Corporate Escalation called me today (1/28). Then an hour later the local director of operations called. They'll be here Saturday. I'll keep you posted.


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## mattyro7878 (Nov 27, 2014)

I have Xfinity--no TA. If I had to go back to a TA I would drop TIVO. If Comcast can do it , why cant everyone else including TIVO make it work?


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## htjazz (Jul 21, 2010)

Okay. A Spectrum field operations supervisor came Saturday. We talked over all that was going on. We discussed possible interferences with the cable. He checked the work of the techs that had been here in late October, checked signals, etc. He also noted that the people behind us were having issues as well. He went out on the pole and found one cable that had been sliced, and oddly, he brought in a 1 foot long coax cable that had been spliced, was plugged in and just dangling on the line connected to nothing. He said that in itself was probably spraying signals all over the place. (And why didn't the techs from October see it?)

I purposely avoided turning to any of the problem channels before he got here, hoping the TA would flake when he got here so he could see it and the dramatic loss of signal. Of course, it didn't happen. There were no TiVo issues while he was here. We walked around the house and checked various Spectrum boxes. I'd told him of us constantly getting messages to upgrade when we turned to channels we are already paying for. Rebooting makes these messages go away. Fortunately, it happened while he was here. He said to call and tell customer service that is happening. 

Now, earlier in the week, we had a circuit breaker that tripped. It was for one of the rooms with a TiVo with problems. When Spectrum was here on Saturday, it just happened to trip again, several times. It would't stay on. He checked the breaker box and said there was electricity leaking. The electrician wasn't available until today, but they told us don't try to reset the breaker. Just leave it off until they arrive. The Spectrum tech said that the electricity could also be wreaking havoc with the cable signal--including the constant messages to upgrade our package.

Electrician came today and replaced the breaker. I'm to call Spectrum back on Wednesday and let them know what's happened and if there have been any problems. He's coming back anyway to do some additional work. Other than some very slight pixilation Sunday on Showtime, there have been no problems since Saturday with the TiVos or Spectrum boxes. That breaker was off for two days. It's been back on for a few hours now. I'm going to wear out the problem channels over the next couple of days. But so far so good. I still think I'm going to unplug the TAs for the Super Bowl. My Chiefs are there and I don't want to take any chances. I'll update again after the tech comes back Wednesday. Hope this helps someone.


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## htjazz (Jul 21, 2010)

mattyro7878 said:


> I have Xfinity--no TA. If I had to go back to a TA I would drop TIVO. If Comcast can do it , why cant everyone else including TIVO make it work?


And yes--They could figure out how to work them without the TAs if they really wanted to. This whole switched digital thing is BS to me.


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## htjazz (Jul 21, 2010)

*Problem solved. *Contacting the FCC helped get this thing rolling and our problem is completely resolved. Spectrum was here for several hours last week. (But honestly, I think if our Spectrum boxes hadn't had issues--as well as our neighbors--they would still be calling it a "TiVo problem" without trying to come up with a fix). The problem wasn't in the house, as I always suspected. I was told: *"The return was out of spec and we've applied a permanent fix. We dropped it by 10dB."* The "return" was what the tech said the TA was doing when it attempted to tune to a channel but couldn't and instead flashed blinking lights and appeared to be "rebooting." The equivalent on the Spectrum box was attempting to tune to a channel and getting the message "Please upgrade your package to watch this channel." So whatever they did, it was fixed. We haven't had to reboot anything in nearly a week.

I hope this info helps someone who was having this issue. Thanks for the info you provided in your posts.


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## htjazz (Jul 21, 2010)

thefisch said:


> I never found a solution or fix other than to avoid the troublesome channels. Since I removed unnecessary channels from the guide and turned off suggestions, it hasn't been an issue. Occasionally I will flip through upper tier channels and still get some TA tuning issues.


Our problem was fixed last week. The info is in my previous post on this thread. I hope it helps you too.


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## thefisch (Jul 25, 2015)

htjazz said:


> Our problem was fixed last week. The info is in my previous post on this thread. I hope it helps you too.


Thanks for sharing your solution. If mine starts acting up again, then I will try to suggest the same fix that worked for you.


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## Scott9mm (Apr 5, 2015)

Glad I found this thread. My problem may be related.

First symptom: Last week I noticed my Roamio Plus had not recorded scheduled programs for several days. I was trying YTTV at the time so hadn't looked at Roamio recordings for days until then. I did a power-off reboot (pull the plug) of the Roamio which restored normal operation.

Second symptom: Several days later I tried to watch a TiVo program just an hour after it recorded and discovered only a minute plus ten seconds had recorded; also subsequent scheduled recordings didn't record. Power-off reboot restored normal operation. A previous problem was power-supply related so I also replaced the power supply with a Weaknees spare I had on hand.

Third symptom: Suspecting the tuning adaptor, I unplugged the USB cable from the TiVo. But no change: the same problem still recurred.

Fourth symptom: I was watching live (while also recording) when screen went black 1+10 into the show. Live TV resumed about a minute later but scheduled recordings did not resume. I started recording manually but soon got another black screen and all recording stopped again (and did not to resume even after live TV returned). Reboot from the menu using the remote control did NOT restore normal operation. BUT reboot by pulling the power cord did restore normal operation.

Band-aid fix: I installed a Christmas lights timer on the TiVo power cord to cycle TiVo power off for 60 sec every day at 4 a.m.

Any suggestions welcome.


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