How about the DirecTV call?

I understand that your upgrade disables the Tivo from calling home, but what about the DirecTV aspect of the box?

DirecTV requires phone lines on all if equipment if you have mirrored receivers on the same account. To verify all the boxes are in the same location.

Is this functionality also disabled? Will the DirecTV part of the Tivo phone home to statisfy DirecTV's phone line connection.

In the past I've received notices that one or the other box hasn't phoned home and they tell me I'll get charged for an extra sub. (Yes they are in the same location, one had no phone line during a remodeling project.)

Is it possible to have the DirecTV part report home and not the Tivo part?

Thanks.

Thanks.

But I've read that paragraph a dozen times but I'm still not sure it's answered my question. Maybe I'm an idiot.

But.....that's neither here nor there.....so I can assume that your upgrade disables ALL phone calls thus preventing the box from being able to verify to DirecTV that is in in fact in the location it belongs?

Sorry for re-asking but I just want to be sure what's happening.

Thanks.

Ok cool, thanks.

I'm only asking as I have in the past received mail notifications to my house from DirecTV that one of my receivers (I have 3) hasn't phoned home and if it doesn't soon that they were going to bill me for a separate subscribtion. They are always in the same location however one was unplugged for several months during a remodeling project.

Anyway, thanks for the cool software. You techie guys just amaze me with the things you can develop. Tweeking around inside the Tivo is fascinating to me, but unfortunately I'm just a bean counter. I need all the steps laid out in front of me.

But I must say I'm having great fun pranking my partner by controlling the Tivo from another room. Changing channels, fast forwarding, playing recorded shows etc. That alone is worth the price of admission.

Cheers.

They were plain old DirecTV boxes. Non-Tivo. So perhaps there's a difference.

I just wish they'd get reasonable with the pricing on the DirecTV HD Tivo. I'm really wanting one of those but $1000 is just too pricey for my taste.

DVR Activation and Daily Call

Seemed appropriate to post this question in this thread:

I have a Phillips DSR708 and installed the PTVNet 160GB HD upgrade. Absolutely pleased with the product. Works great, only additional modifications I've made is using tytools to upload recordings.

Yesterday I received 2 messages:

The Recorder has not made a successful daily call for the past 14 days.

and

Your DVR Service is not currently active. To activate, please call DIRECTV Customer Support

I've been running on the new HD for 6 weeks now, this is the 1st time these messages have come up. I do have DVR service, although I recently had to call Directtv because they were billing me for the tivo service when it should have been included in my subscription package. They remove the extra charge and assured me that my DVR service is included in my package.

Is it possible that my use of the unscramble hack and tytools has done something to the daily call requirement? Any thoughts on the DVR service message before I call Directtv to see if they messed me up?

I was out of town 14 days ago, so as far as I know, nothing.

Sorry, I did mean to include that information in my original post, but the answer is yes, I seem to have full DVR functionality in spite of the message. When I turned the unit on (out of standy mode) the DVR message came up right away. I then went to "now Showing" and everything was there including a season pass recording from an hour earlier, then a watched to see if it executed another scheduled season pass recording after seeing the message and it worked fine as well. The unit appears to be working properly in all areas, I was just a little concerned about the message.

BTW, thanks for replying so quickly!

I did restart yesterday after seeing the messages, but did not delete them. The daily call message repeated itself, so I now have 2 for the same date.

Checking in on my unit just now, I have the following info:

DIRECTV Account Status: Account in Good Standing
Services/Features: DIRECTV Multi-Sat
DVR Service: Active
2 Tuners (Record/Record): enabled
Advanced Program Guide
Dolby Digital
Recording Capacity: Variable, up to 140 hours
Today's Date: Thursday, Apr 14, 2005, 11:36 am
Program Guide Data: Not Available
Phone Call:
Last Successful: Wednesday, Apr 13 at 8:31 pm
Last Attempt: Wednesday, Apr 13 at 8:31 pm
Last Status: Succeeded
Next Scheduled: Thursday, Apr 21 at 11:24 pm

Weird...call says sucessful and DVR service says active???? The 8:31pm time for the sucessful call is right around when I restarted the unit.

I'll delete the messages, see if they reappear and keep you posted.

BTW...how cool is it to be able to check into my unit from work!!!! If anyone does not have their DVR networked yet, what are you waiting for????

djl said:

I got the daily call message this morning also. When I installed (it WAS two weeks ago, BTW) I answered yes to "disable automatic upgrade" but no to "disable plug in your phone requirement." Then about 4 or 5 days ago I did the flag_swap PHONE to turn the flag off.

[QUOTE=peb]
The Recorder has not made a successful daily call for the past 14 days.
QUOTE]

For answers to commonly asked questions, please refer to the
InstantCake Instructions and Release Notes,
Official InstantCake Discussion Thread, and the
Official PTVnet Discussion Thread

Please don't cut and paste the same paragraph about phone calls.

I only recently started seeing the "No calls after 14 days" message. I understand that the unit has been " configured to not require a daily phone call". Does that mean it shouldn't complain about lack of phone calls? Since my other unmodded unit has gone 6 months w/o a call before, it didn't require any configuration to not require it.

I've changed nothing via the web interface. Loaded no new code. I just reboot often when it hangs.

Perhaps this 14 day message is another symptom of what's wrong?

3 S2 DTivo's w/PTVnet Upgrade Getting Daily Phone Call Warnings

Hello,

Reviewed all the posts in the thread, and believe I have a situation worth doumenting and asking for assistance in troubleshooting.

I have 3 S2 DTivo's connnected via Wired Fast Ethernet, each with dual tuners enabled. I purchased 3 PTVnet Upgrade kits and 3 250 gig hard drives, and successfully upgraded each of these units just over a month ago.

Each of the units has been working flawlessly, but each of them are getting exactly the same DirecTV Daily Call Failure warning messages at the 14, 21 and now 31 day mark.

Another possibly similar symptom of the Daily Call Warning, I just noticed today that one of them is suddenly only recording on one tuner. (I checked system info and it confirms dual tuner enabled)

I have not tweaked any of the PTVnet upgraded units other than running TyTools to extract gigs of recorded content, I don't think this would affect the PTVnet tool which spoofs the daily call as I recall.

So any help would be most appreciated, as I sense DirecTV may already be trying to limit my service

tivoupgrade said:

I think these are two separate issues:

1) it sounds like the "cron" job that makes the unit *think* its made its daily call has stopped for some reason. try deleting the warning message you've received, and restart the unit; see if/when it comes back

2) the one tuner issue -- you say its only recording on one tuner, but it says two tuners enabled. what happens when you try to record on both tuners? is it "searching" for signal on only one tuner? or is it actually refusing to record something on the tuner? i don't think DirecTV is doing anything that would limit your service - if they were, your unit's TiVo functionality would mostly likely not work; I don't think they have the ability to selectively disable a feature of the hardware that is actually enabled; at least that is not something that is publicly discussed anywhere that I am aware of.

FWIW, we have units that have not made daily calls for almost a year; the "spoof" really is just there to get rid of the warning message, as long as the DVR "tier" is active on your card, your DVR functionality should be fine. Then again, things are always changing at DirecTV so anything is possible I suppose -- if that ends up being the case, it'll be more than just you that will see this problem, as there are a lot of folks out there doing the same thing (even the scripts that we use as part of the PTVnet tools are used by more than just our customers) and I'm not aware of any problems, yet.

tivoupgrade said:

Check your "system information" screen under "messages and setup" to confirm that the last successful daily call was made around the time the system was rebooted.

Then, in a day or two, do the same thing and see if the date is updated. There is a cron process that should be started at boot time and that job is supposed to run another script (called fakecall) about once a day. Also, at boottime, the fixsub routine is manually run as well.

If the cron job "dies" then a reboot of the unit should fix the problem, short and long term. Not sure why the cron job is dying, especially how it could have happened simultaneously on three units, but it appears that may be the case.

If you are more linux-oriented, I can give you some other commands to try and type to look a little deeper, but if you want a quick fix, the aforementioned should resolve the problem. Also note that even if you are getting the messages, they can be ignored without causing any problems (other than it being a pain).

If it happens again can telnet into the unit and run "fakecall" just by typing fakecall.tcl, rather than rebooting your unit, as well.