DIRECTV DVR forces noobie vs. techie showdown

My mom and dad recently got DIRECTV at their summer cottage, a place notorious for terrible television reception even with a decent antenna. But now instead of terrible television reception they have over 200 channels or pure digital television. Quite a change from what they had before.

They also have a DIRECTV digital video recorder (DVR) on one of their televisions. Since my mom and dad have cable television and TiVo on their televisions at their primary home, the DIRECTV DVR software caused a bit of a learning curve.

The learning curve heightened even more when one of the recordings my mom scheduled recorded but wouldn't play back. Luckily I was visiting when this happened so I was able to help my mom debug the problem. During our discussion (or should I say debate?) I found it fascinating to listen to what my mom believed might have caused the bad recording. For fun, I'm listing those reasons below along with my techie rebuttal to each one:

• The television was not on the right input. It doesn't matter what input the television is on when the DVR is recording. It only matters when you play back the recording. Also, I checked and the television was on the right input.
  
  
• A power failure occurred while it was recording. If this had been the case, the recording would have played back until the point where the power failed. But the problem recording wasn't playing back at all. It was just "stuck".
  
  
• Only programs on NBC aren't recording. Since the problem recording was a Monday through Friday show, I checked the next day's recording and it recorded just fine.
  
  
• Somebody messed with the DVR while it was recording. Possible, but not likely. Even so, this would have more likely exhibited the same effects as a power failure (see above).
  
  
• Nothing is recording correctly. I checked a couple of recordings that recorded after the problem recording and all worked fine.
  
  
• Maybe I should call DIRECTV to see if they can fix the problem. I doubt they will be able to fix the problem with your corrupt recording. Most likely they will just tell you to reboot the system. To save time, I rebooted the system with no luck. The next thing DIRECTV will likely tell you to do is to reset the DVR which will erase everything on the recorder. Not a viable solution since there are several other recordings on the DVR that my mom wanted to watch. I told my mom to keep an eye on things and if it happened again, to call DIRECTV to complain about a potentially defective receiver.
  
  
• Maybe the DVR is defective. Possible, but one bad recording does not make a defective DVR. I mentioned again to keep an eye on the DVR and it the problem happened again, to then call DIRECTV.
  

So it seems I was long on excuses and short on my own suggestions which may lead you to ask, "So what do you think the problem is?" Well, plain and simple, I think the software on the DIRECTV software is buggy which caused some sort of glitch during the recording. I can't explain the glitch but I'm sure someone at DIRECTV could even though they would never tell me.

I determined this based on the fact that the recording showed up on the list of recorded shows, the progress bar showed that the duration of the recording was one hour as it should have been but once the recording started playing back, the screen froze black and none of the play, pause, fast forward, rewind or other navigational type remote control keys worked. I also spent a few minutes on the Internet with Google and immediately found hundreds of articles, blogs and forum posts from people all experiencing similar problems with the same model of DIRECTV DVR.

Case closed in my book. But I can't help wondering what the outcome would have been if I had not been visiting when this happened and my mom had called DIRECTV instead. What would they have told her?