Can anyone help...?

I setup my Pioneer HDD recorder to kick in and record channel L1 (DVD's Scart 1) at 9pm (Planet Earth). I set the HC box to autochange to BBC1 for that programme... However on playback of the recording I got solid black... It didn't record any feed but it did record black, also no audio.

So I did a crash recording and just set the HDD to record L1 and any channel I was tuned into and it recorded fine...

Has anyone else had a problem wereby when setting the HC box to autochange channels etc, that it fails to do so?

I'm confident in saying that it's all hooked up fine. HOWEVER I admit that I now only have scart from the HC to my DVD/HDD recorder (TV Out from HC) as I wanted to record a RGB feed and not the poor quality VCR feed...

Anyway, let me know...

Thanks H.

Is it possible the HC box reset itself - I think if you don't do anything with it for a number of hours then it switches itself off into standby mode. Was the HC STB on when you came to check it? Personally I've found this really annoying as I have a Pioneer DVD recorder (420-H) too. The way I get round it (which may well not be applicable to you) is that I have a Phillips Pronto universal remote. I've created timers in that which send a signal (that does nothing major) to the HC STB every 4 hours so that it never turns itself off. Occassionally it does still happen though from either errors or them doing something to the service.

Still, Planet Earth is on BBC1 replay so you've got a week to catch it, and potentially still record it from playing that.

It's probably worth doing a couple of tests for the next program on to see if the autochange and record works out.

Cheers Carefactonil. I do think the box went into standby... why can't we stop that feature... I'll call Homechoice in the morning me thinks!

Thanks. Huw

I'm not sure you can stop it unless you keep using the remote control...
I've heard (on this forum) that the reason for this is to stop the box over-heating, which just sounds like poor design to me. I've been using my Pronto remote control approach since Christmas and haven't had any problems with the STB as far as I know from it overheating.
I agree that it seems crazy to offer the auto-channel change feature (obviously designed for recording stuff like you're trying to) but for it rarely to kick in because of the power-down feature...
Will be interested to see what HC say to you...