This is really addressed to any owner of a Panasonic DMR-BWT735 HD DVD/Hard Disc recorder.

About 20 minutes before the recorder starts recording a timer programme, it does some business with itself. If it is not switched on at the time, you can hear it making small noises to itself. While it does that business which takes a few seconds, it obviously stops whatever else it is doing, including recording!

For example: if I have recorded a drama from 9 to 10 pm & then separately recorded the news from 10pm, when I watch back the drama recording there will be a point at about 20 minutes before the end when the recording will freeze for a moment & then restart, missing part of the programme. The news recording will be fine. The recording fault never occurs when recordings are made in isolation: i.e. more than 20 minutes away from other recordings.

The result of this flaw is that we have a lot of recordings where the recording has obviously stopped for a short period during the course of the programme, then restarted, the pause always occuring 20 minutes before another recording had been set to start.

If you have one of these machines, please can you tell me if it does the same thing? If you set up a timer recording, does the machine click & whirr to itself 20 mins before the start time? Do you have odd pauses in any of your recordings that could coincide with such activity?

Panasonic Service say they have passed it on to their tech staff, but I've not heard from them yet. I don't believe the problem can be unique to my machine. I'm sure it did not occur before the Sept 2013 software update.

Thank you.

I will need to check some recordings about your issue. I will do this and come back to you.

Separately, the more recording service does not seem to be working for me at the moment. I have made a post on the main thread for this device under the Freeview PVRs section. I would appreciate any thoughts that anyone has on that.

I've had a reply from Panasonic:

"In response to your query, I would inform you that this is a known issue caused by the broadcast time tables changing, therefore,unfortunately there is nothing that we can do to solve it."

This sounds like rubbish to me. I can't believe they change the times always 20 mins before I want to record something!

Please can someone tell me if their recorder does the same thing, or if it doesn't?

Thank you.

I have two PVRs for Freeview /Freeview HD recording and neither of them exhibit the behaviour you are talking about.

In both cases the machines do wake a short time before a recording if nothing else is scheduled (you can hear the fan start on one of them on the other you can just about hear it whir into life if you put your ear close), that is standard as the machine wakes up, checks the EPG for any timing changes and then waits on the start signal from the broadcaster.

However if I am already recording, so that the machine is already awake, I get absolutely no breaks in the recordings already in progress, which I understand is the issue that you are having.

Nothing to do with the broadcasters and clearly a Panasonic issue. The machine setting itself up for the next recording, or starting a new one, should have no effect on an existing recording taking place.

Thanks for the reply. Please can you confirm if either or both of your machines are Panasonic DMR-BWT735 machines? I'm sure my problem is connected to a software update for that machine last September.

No, one is a Humax the other is a Digitalstream so the problem does seem to be specific to your Panasonic I am afraid.

I have Sony and Pioneer hdd/dvd recorders so I don't know how relevant the following is to you, but it's a simple test worth trying.
If you're setting up recordings via the epg guide, try turning off any epg link option. Also may be worth trying fully manual timer settings.
In either case you may lose a little off the start and/or end if the programs don't start and end bang on time and you haven't added a few minutes extra in the manual timings.

Thank you Pavier. An interesting thought. I do set up using the epg & it usually has the guide link set. At the moment, while the football is all over the TV, the guide link is pretty well essential. Once that's over, I'll try a few recordings without the guide link set & see if that solves the problem. I've always added a few minutes either side of the scheduled times for safety anyway, dating from when I recorded on VHS in the last century!

John

I've got the DMR-BWT735 doing the same thing. It seems to be randomly rebooting two or three times per evening. I haven't logged the times so the 20min prior to record may well be the same for me.

For last two days I've pulled the internet cable. Someone mentioned something on another forum that suggested signals might be picked up from my network. It was an interesting theory because I noticed that my laptop would always miss an internet beat at exactly the same time as the reboot (laptop being wifi connected).

Anyway, so far I've not had the problem reoccur. Will keep monitoring.

One more thing, my wife thinks the DMR-BWT735 started the bad behaviour when we bought a ChromeCast. We bought this because the DMR-BWT735 was always too busy doing other stuff to allow us to watch Netflix. The Chromecast does a great job of Netflix. We tried unplugging the Chromecast but that didn't stop the rebooting so this is probably a red herring.

Hope that's of help.

Chris