Keep until I delete

Right.  That's not how the HR24's logic works, as you've discovered.  I'm not aware of any easy work-around, short of deleting the series from the Series Manager, or manually removing those upcoming recordings from the To Do List. 

The "keep until I delete" is obviously not what it seems. It only comes into play if the hard drive fills and needs to delete programs to make room for new material. Then the "keep" programs will have priority. This makes the feature useless in my view.

You can increase the "keep at most" setting or you could simply manually record those programs you want and forget the series setup.  I understand that none of this will make the system work the way you'd like, and are I only offer this as possible workarounds.

Thanks.

Do you know how/if it is possible to raise this as an official bug report with DTV? (I don't suppose anything will happen, but I can try!)

Thanks,

            George

You can, although they don't consider it as a bug, it's just the way things have always worked.  There have been many long discussions about this. "Keep until I delete" specifically means don't delete this if the disk is full, delete something else instead. "Keep only n episodes" overrides it. And in some circumstances, recording the new program and discarding the oldest is exactly what you want to happen. I record the local news and only keep five episodes, so when I come back from a trip I get the most recent five.  The oldest five would be useless to me.

Ideally there should be an option to select which logic you want, but that hasn't happened so far.

George,  It would appear that you blew past the suggestion I made to manually record those episodes you want.  You may be the only person we've heard from in some time that actually wants the DVR not to record the latest editions of a program.  In any event, the series record setup has certain parameters, one of which you don't like.  Simply manually recording what you do want is a simple and easy workaround.

Reporting this as a bug will only prolong your unhappy state.  By the way, this type of post invariably comes from a brand new user who expects one thing and gets another.  If you'd embrace the HR24 as the slick and new device it is, and treat learning it's in's and out's as an adventure, it would be a lot more fun.

I too can see his position and I'm sympathetic.  There are any number of somewhat obscure "enhancements" that could be done to the UI and this is one of those.  In the meantime though, he'll enjoy his system a lot more if he learns to live with what he's got.  Kinda like being married, or having a job.

Hi all,

Thanks for replies. I didn't intend to argue but it seems necessary.

This feature has not "always worked this way." On the early DVR's, based on TiVO, it worked as the plain UI text suggests it works. I gather the fault arrived with the R15, which was a DTV product and TiVO derived. I was just late in trading my R10 for HR24, and I'm not convinced it was a good trade.

Secondly, as far as I can tell, the behavior that "keep until I delete" gives is exactly the same as the behavior when using "keep until space needed." Two setting for the same behavior make it clear that the UI designers had differing behavior in mind.

Lastly, I have spent a significant chunk of my career in writing and managing embedded software. When a customer suggests that a feature is not working the way common sense says it should work, that was a reason for taking action.

Perhaps the solution is to see if Dish DVR's work as I expect.

But thanks for the replies - I appreciate you all taking the trouble.

You're certainly welcome to try the Dish DVRs to see if they're better. We're customers like, not DirecTV employees.  We're just explaining how it works.  Be sure to email your suggestion to DirecTV directly.  Perhaps with enough inputs they'll change this behavior.

I meant that it has always worked this way on the DirecTV-designed DVRs, the TiVos were different.